New Foxx Debugging Preview: ArangoDB Updates

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
   
   ArangoDB 2.5 has updates ready for all of these points. Just as a teaser we have backported one of the new features into ArangoDB 2.4 which will be included from 2.4.2 onwards: Most of you who already used Foxx and created an error, be it syntactic or a forgotten require and tried to access your App just received a 404: Not Found which is indistinguishable from a correct Document not found.

This has been replaced now by a default app that will be used whenever the app written by you cannot be parsed by ArangoDB. It will return a 503: Service temporarily not available on all routes of the mount point.

In the development mode you will also get a stacktrace from ArangoDB.

]1 New foxx output if App is broken.

However in 2.4 the stack is not complete as validating the app and mounting it are two independent steps internally. Where the stack containing your application is build up during validation, but the error app can first be created during mounting.

In 2.5 both steps will be merged together allowing us to give you even more information about the error.

So Foxxers out there, stay tuned for the next releases, they will make Foxx an even better friend. Michael