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The case of James Gosling and the missing Javascript Debuggers

James Gosling recently claimed that: "None of the browsers has decent debugging hooks".

I've got a list of of Javascript debuggers that might be interesting. I think they must use the debugging hooks in Firefox and IE.

I'm sure there must be something in IntelliJ too, but I don't have a link. Maybe there is something on the cards over at JSEclipse too.

Perhaps James' issue is that the the hooks in FF/IE are not 'decent'? I guess there's also a very good chance that he was misquoted or misunderstood - it wouldn't be the first time a journalist had done that. But if not, it would be good to understand why he discounts this list.

Opera and Safari are conspicuous by their absence. Anyone have any good solutions? And I'm sure there are other debuggers missing.

Which is your favorite?

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Posted by Joe Walker on 21 April 2006 00:08:30 BST #


Re: The case of James Gosling and the missing Javascript Debuggers

Comment from Oscar Pérez on 21 April 2006 07:16:29 BST #
I'm using Venkman since a while and I think it's a great Javascript debugger. It allows to set breakpoints, watch variables/expressions, etc. There's nothing I miss on it (well, maybe that it has problems when reloading scripts, but that's just an small issue). My Javascript development has speeded up a lot since I use it.

Re: The case of James Gosling and the missing Javascript Debuggers

Comment from nhm tanveer hossain khan (hasan) on 22 April 2006 23:42:30 BST #
FireFox web developer is nice tool... though it can't debug javascript but it helps to work with javascript and HTML and CSS... URL: http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/ also 'Tamperdata' it helps to look around your hTTP request and response... URL: http://tamperdata.mozdev.org/ regards, nhm tanveer hossain khan (hasan) http://hasan.we4tech.com

Safari and Opera

Comment from Leland Scott on 23 April 2006 16:51:50 BST #
A really good JavaScript debugger for Safari is embedded in Widgetarium, an IDE for building Dashboard Widgets, which of course are nothing more than little websites that live outside of the browser. It's also possible to use JS-Sorcerer as an Eclipse plugin, though that's kind of pricey. Widgetarium also includes an excellent DOM tree, as well as an interactive JavaScript mode.

Opera has an excellent JavaScript debugger built in. Version 9's debugger includes backtrace messages that give you everything you need to pinpoint errors. See the example error messages I've included in my recent article on Microsoft Atlas.