I’ve been doing a lot of playing lately with MobileFirst, and one of the cooler features it has is the ability to write adapters in JavaScript. I blogged about this last week and today I thought I’d share a few tips/notes for folks who may be new to this feature.

First and foremost, it is important to remember that you are not using a full Node.js-style stack. You are working with a subset of the Rhino container developed by Mozilla. This is a JavaScript engine that runs within the context of a Java server. However, this is not a full Rhino implementation as some features, like load(), are not implemented. Unfortunately we don’t document these differences (yet – I’m filing an enhancement request for this today).

Second, you cannot debug via console.log. Instead, simply use the WL.Logger API as shown below:

function getDetail(id) {
	WL.Logger.info("getDetail, requesting id "+id);
	return WL.Server.invokeSQLStatement({
		preparedStatement : getDetailStmt,
		parameters:[id]
	});
}

And where do those logs show up? Type mfp logs at the command line to be shown where your logs exist:

Then you can simply go to that directory and look at messages.log. I’d simply tail -f it while you work to see incoming messages. The log is a bit verbose, but you could use other tools to filter it out.

The third point to consider is that adapters are session-based. That means you can persist data by simply using a global JavaScript variable, but it will not be global to the server.

Finally, and I’ve mentioned these before, but don’t forget that you need to “build/deploy” when you edit your adapter files. You can use the bd shortcut for adapters just like you do for your web assets: mfp bd. You can also test your adapters directly from the command line using mfp invoke.