Daniel Eneström

I guess I’m not the only one who’s been searching for an IE equivalent of Firebug. Being a Mac developer using Visual Studio simply to be able to debug my web sites in IE has never really been an option and the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar is too simple for my needs. I want to be able to debug JavaScript, not just CSS and HTML DOM. Long have I pulled my hair trying to find out why the h*ll something is working fine in Firefox/Safari but not in IE.

The other day I came across the DebugBar by the French Toulouse-based company Core Services. It’s excellent! Well, not as simple, clean and accurate as Firebug, but still way ahead of all the other debug solutions I have found for Internet Explorer. And it also has some good features that Firebug is missing.

Vive la France!

When I first discovered the Spry Ajax framework by Adobe I was jubilant. It gives my HTML applications a similar functionality to the Flex applications I so love. For those who haven’t yet discovered Spry I can tell you it’s a collection of APIs, tools and widgets that make it easier for you to implement ajax functionality on your web site. Many of the widgets are useless (to me) but in general it’s excellent. You can more or less just associate a set of graphics (like rows in a table) with an array (imported externally or built into the page) and the graphics repeat themselves according to the arrays rows. You have to try it to understand its brilliance.

The downside
The documentation is very thorough, but very badly structured. As an example the API documentation does not include the events that can be “listened to” by observers. One has to browse through the Overview document and make much use of the “find” feature of the browser (thank god I’m using Firefox) to find such things.
Another problem is that it sometimes just don’t work. The framework has a really nifty debugging tool built into it, but sometimes errors don’t fire. Simply nothing happens and that makes me furious! I’ve been trying to solve such a problem all day today, but simply can’t find what’s wrong. Firebug (a must-have tool) tells me my dataset has all the data. If I look through the page’s DOM I can find the object there, with all the data in it, but the {labels} I have used in the code are replaced by… nothing…

I’m tired…