AJAX In Action [276]
The most prominent Java IDE at present is the IBM-sponsored Eclipse. Eclipse is mostly a Java development tool and ships with a complex set of plug-ins specifically written for Java developers. A thriving plug-in community exists, including some relatively simple JavaScript plug-ins providing syntax highlighting and outline views of methods and classes (figure A.2). With the recent Eclipse version 3.1, a broader range of web developer plugins is being developed by the Web Tools Platform project, which in addition to supporting server-side J2EE technologies, has editors for JavaScript, XML, HTML, and CSS. Eclipse also offers strong project-level codebase-management features and full integration with CVS version control out of the box. Third-party integration with Subversion, Visual SourceSafe, and other version-control systems is available. Some enterprise Java development tools such as the Sun Java Studio Creator and SAP NetWeaver offer high-level design facilities for web applications. In our experience, these are based heavily on the classic web application metaphor, with an application being modeled as a series of discrete pages, and may translate poorly to the Ajax approach. Studio Creator uses Java ServerFaces (JSF) behind the scenes, however. We discussed JSF and Ajax in chapter 5, and although the two technologies have some challenges to overcome before being fully interoperable, it may be possible that JSF-based tools will support Ajax better in the near future. Figure A.2 The JavaScript editor plug-in for Eclipse provides rudimentary outlining support for JavaScript objects but doesn’t handle the full object-based syntax. Licensed to jonathan zheng 570 APPENDIX A The Ajax craftsperson’s toolkit As well as having a foot in the enterprise-development camp, Ajax has roots in the web-design community, for whom an entirely different type of toolset has developed. Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage are two notable web-design tools of this type, and both offer support for the basic client-side technologies used by Ajax. Dreamweaver provides good support for basic JavaScript and CSS editing (figure A.3) and a two-way HTML editor with visual and text modes, but for WYSIWYG orchestration of complex JavaScript user interfaces, it supports only its own code library. Integrating third-party libraries such as x, Prototype, and Rico into a Dreamweaver or FrontPage project would require a lot of hand-crafting the scripts, making use of the text editor functionality of the tools and relatively little else. The final tool worth a mention here is ActiveState’s Komodo, which is a crosslanguage scripting IDE, supporting Perl, Python, PHP, Tcl, JavaScript, and XSLT. Komodo has very good support for JavaScript codebase navigation and a sophisFigure A.3 Dreamweaver’s editor supports JavaScript and CSS. The CSS file being edited in the upper-right pane is also shown in outline form in the upper left. Licensed to jonathan zheng Debuggers 571 Figure A.4 The Komodo IDE provides high-quality outlining features for JavaScript objects and can understand a number of coding idioms. Here the code outliner has recognized that various functions belong to the ObjectViewer prototype. ticated outliner that recognizes JavaScript classes as well as functions and methods (figure A.4). As a general-purpose scripting IDE, it deals only with JavaScript the generic language, not the browser-based implementations. As such, it is most useful when developing domain models for Ajax. Komodo is a commercial tool with free trials available. As an interesting aside, the Komodo UI is built using the XML-based XUL toolkit used to create the Firefox web browser. In the next section, we’ll consider another key tool in the developer’s arsenal: the source code debugger. A.3 Debuggers The behavior of simple computer programs can often be figured out by looking at the code, but larger, more complex programs are often too large to hold in your mind all at once. Debugger