Recently I have been doing quite a lot of development in JavaScript and I have taken a look at a couple of JavaScript frameworks mainly focusing onthe Dojo toolkit and Prototype. Both of these have their strengths and weaknesses, I must point out one of the biggest strengths of Dojo is, in my opinion, the Dojo.require() method which allows dynamic inclusion of those files/packages required for a given script.

Currently the biggest weakness of both of these is locating documentation, I started by just exploring the source and trying to figure out what functionality they provided.
more
Continue reading this entry »

I’ve just spent the last couple of evenings playing around with SVG in the latest beta release of Firefox, as I have SVG in mind for a potential little side project.

My tests involve quite a lot of JavaScript, which are adding interactivity to the SVG, and as I have mentioned earlier one of the problems I have with JavaScript is trying to figure out what is going at run-time when things don’t go according to plan (but no errors are thrown), this is exactly what was happening with my SVG.
Continue reading this entry »

jsDebug is a simple utility created to assist with debugging JavaScript development cross-browser.

The usual method for debugging JavaScript is to pepper the code with alert() calls to give you feedback on how the script is executing, this is especially useful in browsers that supply vague and un-helpful information about errors (or even their exact location), but can soon become counter productive - confirming multiple alert boxes breaks the code, test, code flow. This script creates a console to send messages to, where you would have traditionally used alert().
View the jsDebug code entry for the download, instructions on it’s implementation, to see it in action view the jsDebug demo page.