Comments on: Get Your JavaScript Groove On

By: John

John — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 07:25:00 +0000

A nice greasemonkey userscript for Javascript debugging.

http://www.digitalmediaminute.com/article/1622/javascript-trace-window

By: Brito

Brito — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 03:35:00 +0000

Editing: EditPlus. Very complete (though not free, cheap). Don't miss: user tools. It allows me to run all flavors of HTMLTidy to pretty print or validate, or commit/update to svn faster than you can say "I didn't break it"

JavaScript Bible: Especially good with those obscure-hard-to-google issues that you don't even know you'll need. I usually read the portion regarding what I'm trying to do before wasting time making mistakes I could've avoided in the first place.

MS debugger for IE, Venkman for FF. Both indispensable. With complex enough code, there is NO way you can work with alerts. I can't even start to emphasize how important the debuggers are: extremely powerful too! If I just want to track a value, I use a simple tool on my server: I just send the message to my server using XMLHttpRequest to print on my console. I can log as fatal, error, warn, info and debug, though I have only used debug and error anyways.

DevGuru for quick JS reference. It was slightly more useful when it indicated browser discrepancies, but the flipside is that it was a bit outdated. Now you just have to figure it out another way.

Other supahcool goodies: *View rendered source plugin (IE) (http://billfriedrich.tripod.com/downloads/ViewRenderedSourceIE.zip) *AIS Accessibility Toolbar (IE) (http://www.nils.org.au/ais/web/resources/toolbar/index.html) * MS dev tools: view partial source, DOM tree.(IE)(http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/previous/webaccess/webdevaccess.mspx) * FirefoxView (IE) (https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=223)

Web Developer (FF)
IE view (FF) (https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&id=35)
View rendered source (FF) (https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=655)

By: Jeremy Keith

Jeremy Keith — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 05:28:00 +0000

If I may (to borrow a phrase from Ethan) pimp my own kool aid, I’ve just written a book that I hope will be a useful resource.

Here’s the website of the book of the t-shirt: http://domscripting.com/

By: Wei

Wei — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 05:00:00 +0000

The “MS Script Editor” is excellent in debugging for IE. For firefox, there is the Venkman debugger. Note that, the “debugger” keyword works both in the “MS Script Editor” and Venkman’s JS debugger.

You can also configure the MS Script Editor to open firefox for debugging.

The most useful tools in debuggers are break points, interactive js, call stack, and local variables.

Using “alert(…)” just doesn’t cut it for anything other than a small script.

By: mark

mark — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 03:35:00 +0000

myEclipse: http://myeclipseide.com/ js shell: http://www.squarefree.com/shell/

By: JohnO

JohnO — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 01:27:00 +0000

And, my links are broken to devguru. They picked a good day :)

http://www.devguru.com/technologies/javascript/index.asp

By: Matthew Pennell

Matthew Pennell — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 00:56:00 +0000

My JS debugging usually involves the WebDevToolbar Javascript console, the DOM Inspector, and liberal amounts of alert()ing.

Something I’ve been thinking about recently (after seeing what Shaun Inman does with his debugger class in his site script library) is creating a more comprehensive error function - Shaun’s creates a floating div on the page with all the relevant variables/values listed; much more helpful than a series of alerts.

By: Ryan Campbell

Ryan Campbell — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 23:03:00 +0000

Julius - our del.icio.us accounts are all messed up right now. We bookmark Particletree articles, so that we can keep track of what people like to read. I’m in the process of separating my personal links from my Particletree links. You can view my profile at del.icio.us/rcampbell for what it’s worth.

By: JohnO

JohnO — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 21:56:00 +0000

Javascript DOM Level 2 API - http://tech.citypost.ca/web-reference/dom2ref.php

The DevGuru link is for DOM Level 1. 2 is where is get’s interesting (Javascript at that point is essentially an XML manipulation language).

Also here are some bookmarks for catching Javascript Memory leaks (VERY useful when you start doing AJAXy type things):

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/IETechCol/dnwebgen/ie_leak_patterns.asp http://jgwebber.blogspot.com/2005/05/drip-ie-leak-detector.html

Oh yea, one more for the “programmer in you”: Closures: http://jibbering.com/faq/faq_notes/closures.html

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 20:54:00 +0000

Another good Javascript reference is http://www.DevGuru.com. They provide a list of all elements of the language including the events, functions, methods, objects, operators, properties, statements, and values along with examples of them.

Javascript Reference: http://www.devguru.com/technologies/javascript/home.asp They also have references for ADO, ASP, CSS, HTML, WML, and XHTML to name a few.