AJAX Requires a JavaScript Debugger

Filed in archive Programming on December 14, 2005

The title of this post may be obvious to some but it wasn't to me at first. I've broken down and admitted to myself that I have been a JavaScript bigot. I'm told that recognizing you have a problem is the first step towards recovery so with that out of the way I'm pushing forward. I've spent the last couple of weeks programming in JavaScript more than I have in years. At this point I feel as though I have my JavaScript legs back, so to speak.

With that said and with the amount of JavaScript programming I've been doing, because of AJAX, I started looking for ways to make things easier. The first thing I did was start using DWR as my framework for AJAX to Java. After that I struggled an awful lot and looking back simply made things harder for myself because I didn't look for more help sooner.

Since I've using DWR and it in turn uses JSON the trial and error way of debugging JavaScript got a little out of hand. The Alert statements and browser refreshing got old very quickly and a few times seemed pointless.

Because of this mess I started using the Venkman JavaScript debugger that ships with Mozilla. I normally use IE but since I couldn't get the Microsoft JavaScript debugger working in less than 5 minutes, as I could do with Venkman, I decided to use the Mozilla JavaScript debugger instead. It has made my JavaScript programming much easier and in my opinion is a requirement for programming AJAX enabled applications. Venkman is easy to use and lets me see what is contained in my JavaScript objects that are being passed to my functions from DWR. This was key to me because I got really sick of seeing "[OBJECT]" in my alert boxes. J