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APPENDIX A

The Ajax craftsperson’s toolkit

Ajax is a very easy technology to work with. The toolset required to get the job done is minimal, and it is possible to develop complex Ajax applications using nothing more than a web browser, a text editor, and access to a web server—

either on your development machine or through your ISP or hosting provider. Nonetheless, tools are important to programmers, and toolsets are becoming increasingly sophisticated.

As yet, there are no dedicated Ajax IDEs, although these will probably appear in time. Several development tools do, however, offer support for some parts of the Ajax development process. In this appendix, we present an overview of the types of tools available and how they can help you to work smarter and faster. A.1 Working smarter with the right toolset

The right development tools can be invaluable in speeding up repetitive or difficult processes, and they can have an enormous impact on a developer’s productivity. The wrong tools can be distracting, gimmicky, and constraining, forcing a project into a particular process or way of doing things that doesn’t really fit. Different tools suit different people and will suit them better or worse on different kinds of projects. It’s arguably a key part of a developer’s job to devote time and effort to finding the right toolset. Abraham Lincoln put it nicely: Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe. If sufficient attention is invested in doing so, the returns can be considerable. Finding the balance between perfecting your tools and actually using them is important, too, particularly in a fragmented situation such as the current Ajax tools offerings, as you’ll see in the following section.

A.1.1 Acquiring tools that fit

Many tools can be acquired relatively easily, in the form of free downloads, open source projects, or commercial products. There are no mature tools dedicated to Ajax yet, but several are available that are designed for developing web applications, and many of these support JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Ajax uses the same technologies as classical web applications but in quite different ways, as we outlined in chapter 1. Instead of being built out of lots of little pages presented in sequence, an Ajax application will tend to have only a few pages—and often only one—that undergo a variety of programmatic transitions as the user works with them and that talk to the server asynchronously in the Licensed to jonathan zheng

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background. Further, because of the much greater volume of JavaScript being generated, the Ajax programmer is more likely to be developing with JavaScript frameworks (see appendix C for a round-up of frameworks, and chapter 3 for a discussion of a few of the more popular ones).

These differences raise two concerns, then. First, the tool may make assumptions about page-based workflows that are at odds with the Ajax approach. Second, support for JavaScript may be based on the use of a particular set of functions or coding practices that don’t play well with third-party frameworks that the user is employing.

The differences, then, are mainly in the high-level structure of an application rather than in the details. The concerns raised here are more likely to apply to complex tools, such as IDEs, than to simpler tools, such as JavaScript-aware text editors.

It’s important to bear these considerations in mind when evaluating tools for an Ajax project. We’ll raise them again later when we look at the different classes of tools on the market.

Finally, it’s worth noting that many tools these days provide extensible feature sets, in the form of plug-ins. Complex tools such as general-purpose IDEs and web browsers are used by different types of users in different ways.