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Modern Web Development

jtaby.com

21–30 of 87 posts

Re: Modern Web Development

#21
post #18

Wonderful, can't wait for part 2. One question: I don't seem to have the same file navigation for my javascript files as mentioned in this article. There is no "tabbed" browsing, nor an icon with two folders at right angles. Chrome is up to date. Anyone else in this boat?

When you go to "About Google Chrome", do you see something close to "Version 20.0.1114.0 canary"?

I wasn't using Canary, I had Version 18..., thanks!

Re: Modern Web Development

#22
This episode of javascript jabber goes in depth about the chrome dev tools: http://javascriptjabber.com/006-jsj-chrome-dev-tools-with-pa...

I especially like the source maps, which allow you to debug code cross-compiled from another language in that other language. http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/source...

Re: Modern Web Development

#23
Disclaimer: I'm on the Chrome team and specifically focus on the Inspector/DevTools

Majd and I have talked a lot about tooling and the Chrome DevTools in particular. He ends up tweeting me a few requests or bugs a day that I'm routing to the engineering team. I love it.

Majd's writeup here is incredible. I hope to find a way to augment our existing documentation with this very thorough roundup. He's done a similar thing before ( http://jtaby.com/2011/05/31/google-chrome-why-i-hate-it-and-... ) and the Chrome team filed and fixed 33 bugs as a result. For the new article in particular, I expect us to iterate and improve based on the excellent feedback provided here.

I would add that CSS Selector Profiling is mostly in the DevTools so you can see how insignificant of a cost it is (in 99% of cases). But focusing on your network waterfall will pay performance dividends a few orders of magnitude bigger than optimizing selectors. :) That said, Majd knows what he's talking about quite well.

Re: Modern Web Development

#24
"Modern Web Development" does not mean "Works in Webkit", and it does a disservice to future/novice developers to reinforce that notion. What's dominant now was not in the not-too-distant past, and may not be in the not-too-distant future.

Re: Modern Web Development

#27
post #5

This is a great resource and I'm glad Majd wrote it. However, this is really the kind of content that should be coming out of Google itself. Google is in an interesting position. Of all of the major Silicon Valley tech companies, I think Google is the one most seen as the "web" company, and yet they've staked a lot of their future on Android. Android, instead of making the web a first-class citizen, has in fact set t…

> a first-class citizen, has in fact set the mobile web back by years Steve Jobs started it. Everyone will follow it to the bitter end.

There's some revisionist history. When the iPhone was released, mobile apps were supposed to be HTML5 webapps. Developers cried for local apps. Apple responded to demand.

Re: Modern Web Development

#28
Google Chrome Canary dev tools is definitely worth it despite the bugs you see more often when using Canary. It has been vastly improved over the last years. I remember when Firebug was the standard tool for web debugging, now, chrome (specially canary) is the de facto standard for me.

Re: Modern Web Development

#29
post #5

This is a great resource and I'm glad Majd wrote it. However, this is really the kind of content that should be coming out of Google itself. Google is in an interesting position. Of all of the major Silicon Valley tech companies, I think Google is the one most seen as the "web" company, and yet they've staked a lot of their future on Android. Android, instead of making the web a first-class citizen, has in fact set t…

It's true- I've spent a lot of time developing HTML5-based apps (i.e. in a webview) and am already surprised at how much worse the Android web engine is than the iOS one. Google should be all over this (and with the release of Chrome of Android, perhaps they finally are) but it baffles me that it took this long. Meanwhile, it took Mozilla to create Boot To Gecko, a true web OS.

Re: Modern Web Development

#30
This is worth getting your head around just for the console.

I've been transitioning all of my projects from python cgi scripts (yuck), to shtml files, javascript clients, and APIs that run on node.js.

For somebody like me, that has been writing python+cgi for the last 5 years, diving into javascript was daunting. Terrifying even.

Console made this a lot, lot, lot easier. In javascript, you can call

    console.log("thing") 
and it will print it out to the console (again, this is obvious if you're done any JS development, I'm sure).

But that isn't all...

Suppose that I'm working with an object called map_pins. In the javascript console, I can just type:

    map_pins;
and it will print out the object for me in a tree that I can traverse by clicking the little sideways triangles.

Very, very nice.

I can also interact with my javascript functions from the console. If I have a function called update_bounds(), I can force it to fire from the console by just typing:

    update_bounds()
This is really, really nice. Before I discovered this, my javacsript was full of alert("I made it to this without crashing");

It was awful.

If you're learning JS and OP's article looks over your head, at least take the console away from it.

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