Uncle Traveling Matt: Ghostbusters, Inspector Gadget & Firefox

March 24, 2005

Ghostbusters, Inspector Gadget & Firefox

I recently started using the Venkman JavaScript Debugger for Firefox (and other Mozilla based browsers), named after Peter Venkman from the 1984 movie Ghostbusters.

Well having used javascript alert boxes and such like for debugging for years, I have to say this thing is absolutely brilliant.

Especially the ability to watch variable values change as the code executes. Extremely useful for tracking down those niggling coding logic errors—the ones that execute fine but just don't work!

Also of invaluable help is Firefox's DOM Inspector. I had looked at this when I first installed Firefox, but didn't realise it would update the tree to reflect changes made with DHTML—oops! The current project I'm working on creates large amounts of elements dynamically, so this is great for tracking down dodgy object creation/nesting.

However it doesn't help when the problem is actually a bug in Firefox itself (1.0.1), arrrgggh. In this case moving a DIV to be the first child node, made the second child [it's sibling, also a DIV] lose its margins. The problem doesn't occur in the latest Firefox nightly or Internet Explorer, frustrating...

Debugging In Internet Explorer

Having tried the Microsoft Script Debugger and found it to be a flying piece of sh*t, I discovered the link below describing the MS Script Editor; a very capable javascript debugger for Internet Explorer. Very useful when you're debugging a msie specific code fork, especially since IE's default error messages are most completely useless...

Javascript Debugging using the MS Script Editor

Posted by Matt at March 24, 2005 3:22 PM