Comments on: JavaScript: A tool too sharp?

By: mhanney

mhanney — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:48:28 +0000

Regarding tooling and refactoring, JetBrains is strong in this area. RubyMine has a great JavaScript editor w/ navigation and refactoring tools similar to ReSharper. Source control integration, including Subversion, is built in and very good.

JetBrains also have a new IDE specifically for the languages of the browser – Web IDE – early access program now open http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/WI/Web+IDE+EAP And Firebug deserves a mention, it is an excellent debugger.

I completely agree with the TDD commentary. Testing is particularly difficult when modern javascript uses closures and callbacks – how do you test values in the result of an asynchronous method call?

For me, a C# web developer, taking JavaScript seriously happened when I moved away from Web Forms and resumed working with actual HTML, JS & CSS in ASP.NET MVC. I also have more time to concentrate on the language of the browser since the drudgery of writing CRUD data access code was solved by NHibernate. It is a very important language, particularly with HTML5 coming, and will continue to solve many of the rich UI requirements that people are using Silverlight for. I wonder if people would sooner target Silverlight, using the tools with which they are familiar, than learn to use JS effectively?

By: Dennis

Dennis — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:35:00 +0000

Dojo seems to have pretty good tools for developing a large javascript program. For a good sample, check out the sourcecode for Bespin, a programmers’ text editor written from the ground up with nothing but javascript, dojo, and the Canvas element.

By: Leyu Sisay

Leyu Sisay — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:01:54 +0000

There are some great videos by Douglas Crockford (The JavaScript Programming Language, Advanced JavaScript, JavaScript: The Good Parts and others…) on yui theater.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/

By: Joshua Flanagan

Joshua Flanagan — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:55:30 +0000

I think calling it beautiful is going a little too far. You just need to re-read the “Bad parts” appendix of “The Good Parts” book to remind yourself – and its not just because of the DOM.
As for TDD, we’ve had success by creating “controller” objects in separate .js files that handle all of the logic in a page, and test them via qunit. All references to dom elements are handled via jquery selectors passed in as options to the controller, so the code is independent of the page it is used on.
Yes, there is still a gap in running the code against the real page, but that is covered by integration/acceptance tests (via StoryTeller/Selenium).

By: Sebastian Markbåge

Sebastian Markbåge — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:40:06 +0000

I’d recommend that you take a closer look at MooTools. MooTools embraces the native JavaScript language even further than jQuery and includes similar syntactic beauty of jQuery.

The beauty of MooTools is that it embraces a Class-based and object-oriented model that we’re used to with a strong background in .NET. But in the paradigm of JavaScript. It makes it very modular and extensible which is a must in large scale applications.

That’s why Google has GWT – to make things like Gmail which needs more competent tools than a simple DOM wrapper.

That’s no reason to give up on JavaScript as a language. Quite the opposite.

http://www.jqueryvsmootools.com/

By: Chris Missal

Chris Missal — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 03:57:01 +0000

“JavaScript is a beautiful little language”

I couldn’t agree more, there’s a video out there by John Resig entitled “The DOM is a Mess”, in which he says: “When people say they hate JavaScript, they probably mean ‘I hate the DOM’”

This is true, most JS problems are not with the language, but with the DOM.

I feel that JS is getting a lot of momentum in terms of respectable tools out there, a good sign for web developers!