Tools & Environment

[nadersoliman]

Hi Everyone,

One big problem with me for javascript in web development is the tools and environment to use for these development.

OK JSEclipse looks promissing but I wonder

1. Can we debug, breakpoints watches etc .... forget about FireFox addons they crash and hang all the time.

2. How about integration with html/aspx development?

Namely I need the profs out there to outline the tools they use to ease this development for them for ASP.NET web developers.

Best Regards,

[jack.slocum]

Visual Studio 2005 has a great debugging environment integrated with IE. It should work great with ASP.net. Then you can use JSEclipse to edit the JS files. It sucks needing two editors, but Visual Studio's JS support is terrible.

[nadersoliman]

Thanks Jack for the tip, but I still wonder do you have any other approach for debugging other than

Placing a debugger; statement and then attach to process?

I think the main obstacle for proper JS employment in web apps is the lack of strong full-cycle development environment, or rather RAD approach as VS and other tools.

[jack.slocum]

I don't actually use "debugger", I use "throw 'wtf';". :)

[zkim]

Aptana (http://www.aptana.com)
Interesting open source web IDE built on Eclipse I ran across the other day, I believe the next milestone includes an integrated debugger.

[nadersoliman]

Thanks Zkim, that looks promissing ...

Also to make the discussion complete for other visitors what books for JS do you recommend? Actually I am looking for 2 types of books

1. Java script language hands on type book, samples and such.
2. Java script language specification, reference type book.

Best Regards,

[jack.slocum]

Aptana is a nice IDE. Unfortunately it doesn't recognize my favorite object construction code so I wasn't able to use it. I should check for an updated version though.

As for books, I used the old Microsoft JScript CHM help file. :)

[jakeonthenet]

I think for doing ASP.NET work one would be hard pressed to find better tools than VS2005.

[davidascher]

We're currently doing a beta of Komodo 4 (see activestate.com/Products/Komodo), and beta2 out soon will have a lot more javascript "code intelligence". Feel free to give the betas a spin and let us know what we can do to make it better! Thanks.

(btw, it's not open source).

--david

[jack.slocum]

David, I am grabbing it now. I will let you know my thoughts. Thanks for posting.

[jack.slocum]

David,

I like it. It's a little light on JS features and for core library development I will probably stick with JSEclipse, BUT for all around development (I used it exclusively to build the new Documentation Center (http://www.yui-ext.com)), I like it a lot. Since it supports so many languages/platforms it makes it easy to edit everything in one IDE.

Any chance on offering some kind of open source discount license?

[sjivan]

I use IntelliJ IDEA. Although its considered primarily a Java editor, I love its JS, CSS and HTML intellisense, autocomplete, error highlighting features and more.

Sanjiv

[jack.slocum]

I have intellij as well and couldn't live without it doing Java work. Unfortunately it doesn't handle complex JS objects extremely well. I have been trying to use it simple for it's shortcuts. I really love ctrl+alt+v . :)

[allaboutyui]

I'm using Aptana but it doesn't have PHP support yet.

Some features of it are nice, but it needs time to mature.

The editor Dustin Diaz uses in his screencasts looks quite nice, but its for Macs only !

[jack.slocum]

When I'm on the mac TextMate is awesome. I wish they had a version for windows!

[Animal]

Firebug looks like it's going to evolve to be maybe better than the VS debugger: http://getfirebug.com/

[jack.slocum]

Yeah it looks really nice.

[cblavier]

Do you also have an "Unresolved variable Ext" in IntelliJ .?
I have auto-completion on all extjs objects but Ext ... it's weird

Since there isn't "import" statements in Javascript, how do you think that IntelliJ resolves completion ?

[vtswingkid]

Textmate for windows!!!
http://www.e-texteditor.com/

Pretty good for beta, thought this was worth mentioning.

[sjivan]

I have intellij as well and couldn't live without it doing Java work. Unfortunately it doesn't handle complex JS objects extremely well. I have been trying to use it simple for it's shortcuts. I really love ctrl+alt+v . :)


Have you tried the latest IDEA EAP builds (Selela)?

[sjivan]

Firebug looks like it's going to evolve to be maybe better than the VS debugger: http://getfirebug.com/

Debugging in Firebug is sloooow. Stepping though lines and evaluating expressions is way to slow for me to be productive. I much prefer the MS VS 2005 Javascript debugger. Its fast and feature complete.

Sanjiv