Lately I’ve found myself doing a lot more web application development in JavaScript. Typically, I always seem to fall back on plain old Notepad++ or Visual Studio. As a developer, the user experience in either is, IMHO, somewhat lacking. However, for the past week, I’ve been using RubyMine. RubyMine is a Ruby on Rails IDE from Jetbrains, but it seems to work rather well for editing JavaScript and HTML files. Plus, as an added bonus, it automatically comes with built in support for jQuery.
Update November 20th: Well, a quick search of StackOverflow.com, and it turns out that I’m not exactly alone in this matter. According to this post (and Grant in the comments of this post), in versions of IE < 8, one must use the click event, and not the change event.
I ran into an interesting issue today. I don't really know the answer, but I figured I would blog about it so that I don't completely forget it.
Well, I don't know why it's taken me so long to get to get around to this: but I must say that there are now a couple of "must haves" in my web developer's tool box. One of them is jQuery, and now the other is QUnit.
Chad Myers has a good, quick, post introducing QUnit, I'd strongly suggest checking it out if you do web development (which, IMHO, implies some use of JavaScript, right?
As far as web developer's go, I'll freely admit that my Javascript is not one of my strong points. I don't have a real good reason for this, it's just that over the past few years I haven't had much call/need to polish and hone my Javascript skills. Recently I discovered jQuery, and I must say that I wish I had know about this library earlier. The more I use jQuery, the more I like it.
In my last post, I described how easy jQuery makes it to call an ASP.NET Web Service via AJAX.
Currently, I'm developing on Windows XP (SP2), Resharper 4 (running inside Visual Studio 2008), and using the Visual Studio Web Server. We deploy to Windows 2003 R2/IIS6. When I pushed the code described in my last post to the development server to test it out there, the web service call kept failing with an HTTP Status of 500 (internal error).
One thing I noticed since I started doing ASP.NET programming back in 2002: I started using Javascript a lot less, and my copy of JavaScript: The Definitive Guide sits on the shelf gathering dust. I've noticed a lot of developers I've worked with are the same way. In fact, I'd say that most of the ASP.NET programmers I've worked with these days really don't know much about Javascript.
I don't blame Javascript itself for this - I blame ASP.
