Debugging MapReduce in MongoDB

On a project that I am working on, we are doing some pretty intense MapReduce work inside of MongoDB. One of the things we've run up against is the lack of solid debugging tools. Some Googling basically tells you that print() is all you've got.

We've decided to take a different approach and debug our MapReduce code in the browser. Since the code is JavaScript and modern browsers have really excellent support for debugging (breakpoints, variable inspection, etc.) it's pretty easy to do.

All you need is a web app (or even static HTML file) that will:

1. Load up one of your documents that you would like to map in the browser. Since the documents are JSON, this is easy. In our project, we have JSON fixture files and a small web app that allows you to choose which fixture to use for testing.
2. Mock the emit() method. You can just have it write to a Hash that you can inspect later.
3. Load up the Map and Reduce functions. If you keep these in separate .js files, you can pull them in with a simple script tag.
4. Bind the map function to the document so that it has the correct context. In a MongoDB mapper function "this" is set to the document that you are mapping. You can easily do this with the bind() function in Underscore.js. I'm sure that other JavaScript frameworks provide a similar function.
5. Put a link on the page that will let you run the bound function.

This will emulate the MongoDB MapReduce environment, but you can now use the browser's debugging tools.