Webmaster's tool | sotarsoft.pl - oprogramowanie

How to keep JavaScript under control? There is a spectrum of tools offering possibilities of debugging, programing and code verifying that make a webmaster's life easier.

No doubt, that the most excellent among them is "FireBug" - a Firefox plugin. It consists of a Javascirpt console, debugger, DOM structure previewer, CSS previewer and editor, previewer of HTTP communication and more other handy options. A good supplement for Firefox users is the plugin Web Developer. It consists of many helpful functions, mainly related to HTML, CSS, and to JavaScript. Firefox has one shortcoming - it cuts the reqXml.responseXML in AJAX connections to 4096 characters.

Thanks to FireBug it's easier to see this problem.

For 7.0 Internet Explorer there is the "IE developer toolbar". It doesn't give you so many possibilities as the plugin "Web Developer", but it allows DOM structure previewing and it has HTML and CSS code valdation tools (Why doesn't it use an external w3c tools for validation? Everyone aware of M$ politics knows it!).

Microsoft Office users can enjoy Microsoft Script Editor, that may be additionally installed (Why is it added only to MS Office? Good question!). It lets you debug JavaScript in IE. Another application of this kind is the Fiddler application, which purpose is to snoop IE HTTP connections.

Very useful for JavaScript verification is a tool called jsLint. Whereas sIEve is used for IE memory leaks detection.

While building applications using JavaScritpt, it's good to keep in mind these few tips, because they always have a positive influence on the application work:

• Aggregate all your JavaScript files into one file (It decreases markup related to multiple TCP connections).
• Serve such a file in a compressed form (eg. ShrinkSage + JsMin + gzip).
• Generate unique URLs (because of long JS caching in the browers, which don't even check if the script on the server has been updated).