I'm just writing to ask for input on your web development process
when writing and testing JavaScript. Do you use tools like
DreamWeaver, Eclipse, Coda? Do you use a text editor like Xcode,
TextMate, jEdit or BBEdit? If you use a text editor for development
and happen to get syntax or other errors in a browser which testing,
do you manually open the file on question and goto/search for the
line manually each time? Do any of you use tools which verify your
syntax before running your webapp?
I work with a lot of developers on all platforms, they mostly use
DreawWeaver, BBEdit, Smultron, and Safari 3, which has the most
brilliant and powerful DOM inspector.
That said, the team's most productive programmers use our home-made
environment, Smile (and test in all browsers with an Intel machine +
Parallels.) Smile is free. Smile is far from featuring all bells and
whistles, however I let you judge why they prefer it.
- Smile is a Unicode and ASCII text editor, featuring a "Duplicate
selection" command, and a lots of handy commands such as "Duplicate
file", "Rename file",
- Pressing Enter in a html window checks the XML syntax (tags closed etc),
- Pressing cmd-Enter checks the DTD validation (transitional, strict etc),
- Pressing option-Enter renders the page (Smile is a Webkitter, like Safari),
- Pressing shift-Enter syntax-colors the page,
- Smile includes a "Javascript Terminal" to send (via AppleScript)
Javascript programs (or lines) to, either Smile itself, or Safari.
For instance you can load a new version of a handler in the current
page and test your changes without reloading the page. Javascript
Terminal displays nicely all Javascript quantities (arrays, objects
etc),
- Smile includes a scriptable XML engine, so you can make DOM-based
automated changes in the files,
- Smile includes an advanced (Unicode-savvy) find and change tool
supporting Regular Expressions, featuring "find/change in all open
windows" and "find/change in all files in folder ..." (and more),
- the contextual menu on a Javascript's handler name proposes to open
its definition, if it's in the open windows or in the recently opened
windows,
- Smile is able to send POST and GET HTTP requests for testing purposes,
- Smile includes a "html2xhtml" command to make the dynamic html from
a browser (document.body.parentNode.outerHTML, namely) into a
XML-valid XHTML document and edit it.
Some of the features are not publicly available (we don't spend time
on maintaining an extensive distribution), you have to subscribe to
Smile Users discussion List to get them.
