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John Resig, a member of Mozilla's Firebug development team, announced yesterday that the final version of Firebug 1.2 had been released. Firebug is a debugger for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that sits within the Firefox Web browser. It has become an essential tool for Web developers, particularly those who use the modern technique known as Ajax ( asynchronous JavaScript and XML ).
JavaScript has become an increasingly important part of the Web application ecosystem. JavaScript is the key to many of the Web's most interesting applications, using the Ajax paradigm ( Asynchronous JavaScript and XML ). This has led to a renaissance in the use of JavaScript, as well as a flurry of libraries aimed at making it easier to use and cross-browser compatible. It was thus with a great deal of excitement that several JavaScript developers announced late last week that a new JavaScript engine, known as Tracemonkey, will be a part of Firefox 3.1 when it is released. The Tracemonkey engine is dramatically faster than the existing JavaScript engine, with some actions running 20 times faster.
Want to learn a new programming language or development framework? Books, magazines, and blogs are excellent -- but a growing number of people are also learning from screencasts, tutorials that combine someone's voice with a video of their computer screen. You can watch the teacher develop in real time, describing the actions that he or she is taking while they take place. There are many screencasts for open-source languages and frameworks, many for free and some for a nominal fee. Screencasts are playing a growing role in my attempt to keep up with new technologies, and you might well find them useful, too.
Prototype makes it easy for developers to work with HTML forms, asynchronous Ajax requests, and create and manipulate HTML elements. However, Prototype is a bare-bones library, providing none of the widgets or special effects that are included in many competing open-source JavaScript libraries, such as Dojo and YUI. It should not come as a surprise, then, to find that developers have stepped in to fill this void, creating a number of libraries that sit on top of Prototype and/or Script.aculo.us. There are several libraries that make it possible to draw graphs and charts within the browser window using JavaScript; this week, Deensoft announced the pending availability of their graphing library for Prototype, known as ProtoChart.
If you're a Web developer, it's a pretty good bet that one of your most important tools is Firebug, an open-source debugger for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Ajax that works inside of the open-source Firefox Web browser. Since it was first unveiled several years ago, Firebug has taken the Web-development world by storm, revolutionizing developers' ability to modify, test, and debug Web applications. In the last month, Firebug has received hosting and development assistance from Mozilla, a change that will almost certainly benefit both the software and the community.
Client-side Web developers work mainly in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, displaying and manipulating data within a Web browser, while retrieving and storing that data on the server. One exciting new entry on this front is SproutCore, a new JavaScript framework that brings a full model-view-controller (MVC) approach to client-side programming. SproutCore gained a great deal of public attention in the last week, since Apple announced that its new MobileMe (formerly .Mac) service uses it.
Want to create modern Web applications? You'll need to use JavaScript. But don't write the JavaScript yourself; use one of the high-quality open-source libraries that let you concentrate on your coding, rather than browser incompatibilities.
