RPGDevNet

IE8 adds a (surprisingly good) JavaScript debugger

by Roger Pence

I can’t understand how an otherwise rational human being can eat mushrooms and, with a straight face, say they taste good. They’re fungus! They taste like dirt. They squeak on your teeth. You might as well be eating earthworms and rubber bands. But, still, some people do like mushrooms. I don’t hold that against them. In fact, some of my closest friends like mushrooms. I think they’re nuts but that doesn’t mean I will remove them from my FaceBook friends list (that’s a joke. I don’t have a FaceBook friends list).

IE: the dirt-tasting fungus of browsers

That’s also the way I feel about Internet Explorer. If you like it, if it makes you smile, that’s great. Good on you. If all I did was browse Web sites, IE might make me smile. But I use a browser as much as a developer tool as I do as a relaxation/research device. As a developer tool, IE just plain stinks. Firefox, with its add-in model, is sooooooo much better for so many reasons than IE is. Do not attempt to write (and learn) JavaScript without Firefox and its premier add-in debugger Firebug and its add-in Web developer tools. These are seriously powerful Web developer tools.

Having said that, with Internet Explorer 8 Microsoft has finally made a firm commitment to make IE developer-friendly. IE8 has Web development tools built into it. And pretty good tools at that. Previously the IE Developer Toolbar was an optional add-in for IE 6 and IE 7. While that add-in doesn’t offer JavaScript debugging, if you’re stuck with IE 6 or 7, the IE Developer Toolbar is a must-have for developers. IE8, though, emerges as the Microsoft browser of choice for developers. It’s built-in debugger (shown to the left) offers a much more seamless JavaScript debugging experience than Visual Studio does.

While the IE8 debugger lags behind FireBug in features (you can’t hover over a value for a quick watch display during execution with IE8 like you can FireBug, for example), it is surprisingly effective and helpful. It’s a bit too modal for my tastes and has a few clunky UI elements, but still, it’s a giant step forward for using IE for development purposes. IE8’s built-in developer tools is a yet another promising sign that MS is paying more attention to Web development.

In an interesting bit of related news, Opera also recently started including its own integrated developer tools. Its JavaScript debugger, while easily in third place when compared to Firefox and IE, shows promise.

The bottom line

If you are a Web developer, you absolutely have to install IE8 on your PC. Install it today before you forget! And, while I’m at, if you don’t yet use Firefox and its add-on development tools, do that today, too! They are all free and offer amazing power.

 

IE 8 debugger links

Fantastic new Javascript debugging tool with IE 8 and its list of features hard to live without

Falling in love with the IE8 JavaScript debugger

IE8 Script Debugger – Under the hood

Sensible debugging in IE 8

JavaScript: No longer the painful festering boil of Web development

by Roger Pence

About four years ago, JavaScript teetered on the brink of obscurity. It was the language everyone loved to hate, it was the language that ASP.NET went out of its way to hide from us, and it was the language that conjured up dire cross-site scripting security exposures.

Ajax has pretty much single-handedly brought JavaScript back from the dead. In 2005, Jesse James Garrett published his seminal paper on Ajax and almost overnight JavaScript went from being the painful festering boil of Web development to the nearly universal answer for how to achieve a rich UI with HTML.

I’ve spent lots of time with JavaScript over the last several years (especially as it relates to Ajax) and am a firm believer that JavaScript is woefully underappreciated. Jumping from beginning intermediate to advanced intermediate with JavaScript can be a little daunting. JavaScript is more a prototype-based functional language than a class-based OO language. To try to impose a class-based OO model on JavaScript (like AVR or C#, for example) will only bring you pain. But after learning a solid foundation of JavaScript principles, its advanced uses are well within your grasp. (For a little JavaScript minding, see this interesting article.)

The ways to create Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) grow nearly ever day. Adobe Air and Microsoft Silverlight are both showing much promise. But even if these models get very successful, there will still be the need for JavaScript for many other sites and apps. Any Web developer today worth her salt should be working now to acquire knowledge of JavaScript.

There literally thousands of resources available on the Web to help you learn JavaScript. I’ve listed several of my favorites below. There are two, though, worthy of special mention.

FireFox and Firebug

The most important thing I did to ramp up my JavaScript knowledge was to adopt FireFox and its JavaScript debugging addon, FireBug, as my JavaScript development platform. Both of these products are free and both are fantastic. FireFox’s add-in model is very powerful (it’s amazing how little regard MS has for adding a plug-in architecture to IE!); there are hundreds of productivity-enhancing add-ins available for FireFox. For JavaScript developers, FireBug is a dream come true (shown to the right). It offers frictionless JavaScript debugging. This is valuable not only for the obvious debugging value it offers, but to see and modify the DOM the way you can with FireBug also makes FireBug a valuable learning tool as well.

jQuery

There are many free JavaScript libraries available. jQuery is one of the best. In about 20K, it isolates you from lots of grungy JavaScript details. jQuery also resolves many browser-dependencies that are otherwise the developer’s responsibility to fix. Its CSS selector-like engine makes modifying the DOM, with Ajax or otherwise, very simple and direct. Microsoft validated jQuery last fall when it announced that jQuery now ships with the ASP.NET stack. This makes jQuery, out of the entire software world, the first open source software to be shipped by MS. MS is making jQuery one of the key enablers of a rich UI experience with the Model-View-Controller engine for ASP.NET. jQuery doesn’t just let you write better and clearer JavaScript, it completely changes the way you approach JavaScript.

The cold hard truth today is this: you aren’t a Web developer if you don’t know JavaScript. And you aren’t a good Web developer if you don’t know JavaScript well! A solid working knowledge of JavaScript is an absolute must for Web developers today. There aren’t any good excuses for putting it off any longer!

I’d bet that it’s a fair to suggest that no matter where in the JavaScript continuum you are, you can and should learn more about it. JavaScript is that rich and deep. Set a course to make better friends with JavaScript now. That knowledge will pay huge dividends.

 

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Helpful JavaScript links

FireFox browser

Firefox Firebug JavaScript debugger

jQuery – superb JavaScript library

Very good jQuery book

Very good JavaScript tutorial site

W3Schools JavaScript tutorial

Interesting JavaScript snippets and articles

Good advanced OO JavaScript article

New JavaScript-focused magazine

Very good JavaScript book by John Resig (John is the author of jQuery)

Very good JavaScript book by Douglas Crockford

Douglas Crockford JavaScript site

Douglas Crockford JavaScript videos

Very good JavaScript/DOM book by Jeremy Keith

 

 

 

 

 

Will your next editor live in a browser?

by Roger Pence

Mozilla Labs recently released a tech preview of Bespin, its server-based code editor (not be confused with the gas giant in the Outer Rim Territories) written in JavaScript. Bespin is a lab project that Mozilla is using to explore the possibilities of hosting an integrated development environment entirely in a browser. Imagine a day when you won’t need Eclipse or Visual Studio loaded locally to write code. Imagine a day when you can use a browser to collaborate on a large project with a distributed team—with a shared code editor. The visionaries at Mozilla Labs think they might be on to something that will enable us to live out these dreams.

You can watch videos that introduce Bespin here and here. You can play with Bespin here. I especially like it when the one lab guy says imagine what it would be like if Bespin could “slurp up plugins.” Those Mozilla guys love that technical talk! This guy is clearly driven by a vision. I played with Bespin the other day and found it very interesting. As the videos state, Bespin is clearly a work in progress but the potential is amazing.

One of the things that will interesting to watch play out with all of this is the evolution of the desktop-bound integrated development environment. While desktop IDEs (I’m thinking Eclipse and Visual Studio here) are powerful, they really haven’t evolved all that much from VB 1.0 back in 1992. We know that the upcoming Visual Studio 10 editor is written, at least in part, with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). WPF dramatically raises the bar on UI possibilities so there may be great strides made there. I’m skeptical, though, that we’ll see much big change initially. While I suspect that Visual Studio 10 will be new and improved, I’ll be shocked if it dramatically raises the bar over Visual Studio 9.0.

Is Microsoft watching Bespin very closely? Probably not. But I wish it would! If we have to be bound to a desktop, there should be overwhelming, undeniable benefits to that. The rich client experience today in both Eclipse and Visual Studio is rewarding and productive. But you can’t help but look at Bespin and thinking about the game-changing potential it may one day offer.

The canvas factor

One more quick thing about Bespin: one of the key enablers of Bespin is the HTML 5 canvas element specification. HTML 5 isn’t very high on my radar because it will be a long time before we can count on the wide-spread adoption of HTML 5-compatible browsers to exploit what HTML 5 offers. Having said that, the canvas element is really cool. Today there is only one major browser family that isn’t supporting the canvas element. Microsoft! Wake up.

Take at look at what JavaScript wizard John Resig is doing with canvas (use Firefox or Safari or Opera to do this.)  The canvas tag is just another technology working to further blur the line between desktop and browser.

rp

Get into the cloud

by Roger Pence

Microsoft recently announced its Azure cloud computing initiative. If you haven’t yet, start paying a little attention to some of the noise being made about cloud computing. Cloud computing’s big three, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, are all starting to turn up the cloud heat.

The notion of putting everything into the cloud might be well into the future for many businesses. But there are compelling reasons today to start thinking about, and maybe even using, the cloud. For example, I know of sites today using Amazon’s S3 cloud services for storing static content (such as images).

One of my favorite Podcasts, Herding Code, recently had a discussion about cloud computing that's very interesting. Some listeners may find that the interest level starts to wane after the cloud conversation. However don’t miss the discussion near the end where the group picks back up on cloud computing. They explain their theories on why cloud computing could be the end of the relational database as we know it! Other “demise of the relational model” theories are also explored here and here. It’s a theory I don’t buy into because something somewhere has to feed the services that feed the cloud. But then, computer folk have a history of wanting to avoid the inevitable future. Terminals? Don’t need 'em--we have punched cards. GUIs? Don’t need ‘em. We’ve got green and black screens that we love. Mice? Get outta here.

Cloud computing discussions and articles often go in one ear and out the other because the discussion often doesn’t scratch your “I’ve got that problem” itch. Yet. Start investigating cloud computing now. Your competition is!

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PS: Check out a very young Keith Richards and his nerdy specs agonizing over the cloud. Aren’t you glad that real nerds don’t age like rock and rollers?

[photo credit: SXC]

Don’t ask me, ask the Google

by Roger Pence

Don’t you hate it when someone asks you a dumb question—a question for which the answer was obviously tailor-made to be delivered via a Google search? A question that makes you want to shout, “Your Google is as good as mine. Leave me alone!”

The engineers at www.37signals.com recently launched a new site that does a great job of providing Google search results while at the same time, in a gentle way, conveying a bit of your frustration. Rather than holler out “Google it yourself!” use www.letmegooglethatforyou.com. It is a great front-end over a Google search that produces a URL you can use to help lead clueless friends out of the darkness.

LMGTFY delivers its search results with a subtle overtone of frustration. The implied frustration may well escape your most clueless friends, but for many it’s likely the kick in the pants needed for them to get more proactive about using Google and leaving you alone!

Forget video clips of sinister looking hamsters, kitties playing the piano, or brides falling into cakes,  www.letmegoogthatforyou.com is a truly rewarding Internet experience! 

[Image: www.letmegooglethatforyou.com]

I’ve got bad news. And that’s good.

by Roger Pence

Alistair Cockburn (it’s a Scottish name pronounced coe-burn) is one of the founders of agile software development techniques and a co-signer of the agile manifesto. He’s written many great books and is generally full of good advice. There is a great (free) podcast featuring Mr. Cockburn available at IT Conversations. In it, he discusses cultural influences on software engineering and the need for good communication to create great software.

As I listened to the podcast, I thought of the team of developers I work most closely with. Take any one software development team and you’ll find a recurring cast of personality archetypes. One of these archetypes is the “Grumpy Old Guy.” All teams have at least one. He’s often easy to annoy, he’s often cranky, and sometimes he’s a bit idealistic. His thoughts about the software project are often considered by the other members of the team as being too pure, too out of bounds for the current path of the project. The most frequent answer to what he’s saying is, “Yeah, that would be nice, but we don’t have the resources to do that.” or “No, the software wasn’t originally designed to do that.” (which we all know translates to, “What you think is a limitation or bug is really a feature.”). The Grumpy Old Guy learned long ago to ignore the rolling eyes and heavy sighs of his peers.

The Grumpy Old Guy’s response is often, “Yeah, but here’s why we need that feature in the real world and why we can’t constrain our thinking simply because of a bug or a lack of vision and planning.” To the consternation of the other members of the team, he’s often right. Let that soak in: the Grumpy Old Guy is often right. His brusque observation needed to be said but a) it was too politically incorrect for anyone else to say or b) the other members of the team were so enthralled with what is working that they haven’t recently taken a critical look at the project’s weak parts.

Arbitrarily imposed limitations on our software, usually put into place because we’ve got the blinders on or choose to ignore a bug or rough spot, can’t be ignored. It often turns out that the Grumpy Old Guy, by shining a light on these issues, serves a pretty good purpose on the team. After listening to Alistair Cockburn and thinking about the Grumpy Old Guy, I came to a conclusion:

The quality of your software development team’s output is proportionate to the team members’ ability to provide, and react to, bad news.

Every team needs a Grumpy Old Guy (who might in fact be on the team in the guise of a young female!). As you work with your team, work with the Grumpy Old Guy to smooth out his delivery a bit. You need his critical views, but they need to be presented in a way that makes the other team members want to listen to him. And work with the entire team to not only expect, but to hope for, bad news. Software doesn’t improve by celebrating its goodness, it gets better by looking for, and fixing, what’s wrong.

Although he doesn’t always say it in a politically correct way, that’s what the Grumpy Old Guy is telling your team.

[Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net]