Aside from the more noticeable features, ArangoDB 2.5 also added the console object to the scope of all Foxx app modules. Unlike the object already available by importing the console module, the Foxx console logs all messages directly to the database.

In addition to allowing you to specify per-application log levels to make sure your debug messages don’t end up cluttering your production database, the API also provides useful extras like optionally logging a full stack trace for every message that is stored as a structured list of objects, making them easy to query using AQL. There’s also a number of convenience methods for querying your application’s log entries from within your Foxx code if you prefer keeping it simple.

console.time('do something');
// ... more code ...
console.time('do more stuff');
// ... even more code ...
console.timeEnd('do more stuff'); // => "do more stuff: 23ms"
// ... a little bit more ....
console.timeEnd('do something'); // => "do something: 52ms"

For more information see the chapter on the Foxx console API in the official ArangoDB documentation.

We are working hard to improve usability and simplify the usage of Foxx which will be shipped with version 2.5. of ArangoDB.

We have learned from the past and collected a lot of feedback, thanks to all people using Foxx already. It helped us to identify the following three important areas of Foxx that should be improved:

1. Debugging of Foxx apps
2. Getting started with Foxx
3. Development Mode
   (more…)

ArangoDB Foxx allows defining job queues that let you perform slow or expensive actions asynchronously.

These queues can be used to send emails, call external APIs or perform other actions that you do not want to perform directly or want to retry on failure. Let’s say you want to send out an email every time you check off an item in your Foxx todo app and you want to use an external transactional email service to do that. (more…)