The ability to see snapshots of a script progress throughout it's execution is crucial for the writing and debugging of complex scripts. There are scripters who are dependent on using the ESTK for developing scripts for the most of Adobe's well know products like InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Premier Pro and After Effects to name but a few. What they do not appreciate is the degree of handicap they are inflicting on themselves because of their dependency. I'll probably discus this topic in the future, don't get me wrong I'm not saying that there is no place for using the ESTK just that it should be used cautiously as an exception. I want to show that the use of the ESTK for the purpose of writing to the console is a bad idea.

OK for your little 20 line snippet it's not necessarily exactly the end of the world, but one has to know that writing to the ESTK console is really incredibly slow, it's comes out pretty illegible, trying to find one entry amongst a multitude of other is no pleasure to put it mildly. There's no keeping of the output from session to session and there's no built in search and find for the console. The use of the alert function has obvious problems, again I'm not saying there's no place for it just that it's very lacking.

An effective well known and well practiced solution is logging. There are many logging API's, I wrote this one to for Adobe JSX scripts to suit my needs. It's very quick, easy to use, produces easy to read and informative logs and has an extensive API. A minor feature of the API is the use of emojis for emphasizing individual log entries so they can be found and categorized quickly, perhaps the implementation here is a bit of an overkill and it would be better to remove a lot of the available emojis.

💾 The Squished Script:

NOTE: For all the snippets below and for general usage of the API either paste the above 2 lines or the verbose 949 line version to the beginning of your code or include it by using the #include directive.
The full API is explained below and the full readable LogFactory.jsx script can be found at the end of the post.

Included Features:
Leveled logging (See below for the meaning of this if you don't know) 👀
Writing and reading level cookies so the log level can be changed without changing the script 👀
Multiple instances of log files 👀
Writing the log to the computers memory and extracting entry ranges of the log 👀
Methods for logging all the arguments of a function and values of variables 👀
A method for logging new objects created as per the $.summary() result 👀
A method for showing the call stack 👀
Different timing methods 👀
🐥 Most importantly easily and quickly produces clear numbered logs with their status and time stamp 👀
And last and least emoji's 🤓

Note:
🤐 The script is made for use on almost all of Adobe's scriptable applications (Acrobat being a noticeable exception) which run extended script. It will not function as is from the js side of an extension, changing the file functions here to work in an extension and or NodeJS environment should be a very simple task. If there's enough demand, maybe I'll do it.
🤐 The script could have been written more efficiently if it was written on a ProtoType bases, I did not do this as I wanted to just be able to add logs using the simple command log('foo'); and not something like console.log('foo');. O.k. I know I could have got around that easily using other methods like function log(){return console.log(arguments);} but the method as it is handles thousands of logs per second and is not going to blow the systems memory so there you have it. I have a simple NodeJS version that can easily vomit 100,000 logs per second, but 10,000 / second should cover most needs.

Snippet

Log Produced

Quick Links
LogFactory.jsx, 💾 DOWNLOAD, 🗜Download Squished Version, LOG, Log Methods, Log Properties, args(), close(), cookie(), execute(), file(), get(), openFolder(), reset(), setCount(), setFile(), setLevel(), setStatus(), show(), stack(), start(), stop(), stopper(), sumDiff(), values()

LogFactory.jsx API For easy creation of leveled logs

Snippet

Examples

Log Produced

LOG METHODS

LOG PROPERTIES

Log Levels and Statuses
Each status has an associated log level assigned to it, these are listed below, by changing the log level one can filter out which log entries will be processed. You might while developing a script want to set the log level to log all debug logs and when done with debugging change the log level to error of fatal so only those levels will be logged.
The logging level can either be set on the creation of the log factory or by using the log.setLevel() method or by directly setting the log.level value.

Note: If you try the snippet on a persistent engine for example Illustrator then the results will differ from those shown here.

myLog1.log

myLog2.log

Timing Methods
These timing methods are to give a rough time of the execution of parts of the script.
For a more accurate method of timing function times I've posted my thoughts and a snippet on the Adobe InDesign scripting forum.

The LogFactory script 💾