I use Eclipse at home (I run Ubuntu), but I can’t say that this plugin excites me terribly. I use the debugging in firebug for a lot of different things (with our own debugging wrapper: dbug.js) and I don’t know that I want all that stuff diverted into my editor… Still, it’s cool and I’ll probably install it just to see if it’s more useful than firebug on its own. I don’t really get all the mileage out of Eclipse that I could, so maybe this is just another instance of me not getting it entirely. To you Eclipse users out there, what do you think?

Note: the comments on ajaxian imply that this plugin isn’t quite ready for prime time as of this posting.
via ajaxian, via Dean Edwards…

John J. Barton has released a new open source framework named Fireclipse that enables nice coupling of Firefox and Eclipse for debugging purposes, working on top of Firebug.

• Fireclipse routes error messages from Firefox’s
  Javascript Console to Eclipse’s console.
• Fireclipse positions an Eclipse editor on the source line reported by Firefox.
• Calls to dump() end up on the Eclipse console
• Fireclipse adds an Eclipse panel to Firebug
• Extensions to Firebug include:

• debug eval() code.
• debug event handlers
• route error messages to eclipse
• executable line numbers marked

Take a peak at the page of screenshots to see it setup in Firefox and Eclipse.

( via Dean Edwards )

via ajaxian:

John Allsopp, who authored XRAY, has a new tool for us to play with. MRI is a bookmarklet that fires up a tool allowing you to query items on the page using CSS selectors. As you put in your queries you will see the items on the page that match. You can also click on areas of the page to show some selector queries that would find that area.

via ajaxian:

VentureBeat is reporting that Google has updated their popular Google Analytics service to begin tracking Ajax and Flash-based requests:

The new additions reflect a growing feeling on the web that pageviews are a less important metric than they used to be. Google Analytics is opening a feature for beta testing that tracks user engagement with elements that have become common with Web 2.0 services, including Javascript, Ajax and Flash applications, widgets and gadgets, and downloadable pages.

With many sites reliant on selling advertising based on page views, this update will allow developers to leverage Ajax, JavaScript and/or Flash without the worry of losing valuable stats data:

While small web companies will be the primary beneficiaries of the new features, the move could also prove meaningful for online advertising. Experts have suggested for some time that advertising rates should reflect elements beyond the simple standard used so far, page views.

Full article here.

Hey gang,

Two new classes in the CNET libraries today.

CNETAPI.js

The first, CNETAPI, is probably not going to be very interesting to those of you reading this who don’t work at CNET. Basically, this class makes it super-duper easy to get stuff out of our REST API. For example:

//you have to do this only once on your page
//this is my dev key; get your own!
new CNETAPI(19926949750937665684988687810562);
//now our request:
new CNETAPI.TechProduct(32069546).chain(function(){
  dbug.log("got the Ipod, here's the data: ", this.data);
  alert(this.data.Name + ": " + this.data.EditorsRating.$);
});

Pretty snazzy, eh? Props go to Hunter Brown who wrote the guts of this class. I (Aaron) added some flare. More details and examples in the wikitorial.

ObjectBrowser.js

I’m working on some CMS tools for selecting options out of a tree (think genres/ontology) and I needed a tree browser. So I wrote a generic one that can be used to explore just about any kind of javascript object. Rather than paste in a lot of detail here, I’ll just point you towards the wikitorial.

Something that’s long been on my list is to do a write up on firebug. It’s such an indispensable tool that I can’t imagine my day without it. It’s like trying to understand how people did anything before the internet. Anyway, over at Ajaxian there’s a post about one that Phil Rees wrote up. If you don’t use Firebug (and if you’re reading this blog, you probably do), or if you feel like you’re not getting everything out of it, you should dig through this.

Phil Rees has written up a nice introduction to Firebug, showing us how you can use Firebug to:

• Inspect custom stylesheets included by Google Mashup Editor
• Modify in-memory stylesheets to see the changes reflected immediately
• Place watches and breakpoints into running JavaScript
• Execute arbitrary JavaScript in the context of your running application
• Monitor Ajax calls, showing response times, posted content, and results
• Profile JavaScript functions to help you identify bottlenecks and optimize your application.

The article walks through all of these points using Phil’s DanceMaps mashup using the Google Mashup Editor.