Where JavaScript developers were once tool-deprived, today we’re often overwhelmed with the abundance of options. In this article, Foundations of Ajax author Nathaniel T. Schutta reviews development environments, debuggers, testing tools, and utilities that elevate JavaScript to first-class status in the Web development world. If you’re still programming JavaScript in a text editor, this survey of the modern tools landscape should open your eyes — and could make your life much easier.

If you like the article, you might also want to listen to the podcast of Andy Glover and I chatting about Ajax, JavaScript, testing and more. Enjoy!

Having no talks Thursday, I settled in with a full helping of Bill Scott and Doug Crockford. Bill introduced Protoscript, a “simplified scripting language for creating Ajax style prototypes for the Web.” I thought it was a pretty interesting tool and something that could really help those of us that build UI mockups (read more here). Doug talked about, you guessed it, JavaScript a topic near and dear to his heart (check out his stuff on YUI Theater to get a taste of what you missed).

Friday I had to go to work! I opened up with my Designing for Ajax talk which was a hit. My audience was just fantastic – they asked a ton of questions and I had a real blast with this talk. From the comments I got afterward it sounds like people learned a bunch and had a good time. Later that afternoon I gave Deconstructing Prototype for the first time and it went pretty well I think. Bill’s Antipatterns talk was great; it just amazes me that some of his examples ever made it out to the real world and I applaud him for being able to turn a critical eye towards his employer. That afternoon I taped a short video on UI/JavaScript etc. that will someday find its way to the NFJS site – I’ll be sure to post when it goes up.

Jesse James Garrett’s keynote was quite something; his slide deck was quite a work of art and had many of the speakers buzzing. He’s clearly a believer in the Lessig/Presentation Zen method; the use of images and words plus the integration of blank screens was worth the price of admission. I also enjoyed the case study from the Netflix folks; they’ve got some great examples of Ajax on their site but what I respect so much is their belief in testing. According to Sean Kane, about 70% of the features his team dreams up never make it out of testing!

During the second expert panel Scott threw out the “what books do you recommend” question and as usual Neal Ford stole two of mine (Dreaming in Code and another that I’m surprisingly blanking on). Needless to say, I’ve got a few things to read in the coming months – here’s a list of what I jotted down to follow up on:

• The Lucifer Effect
• Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering
• Misquoting Jesus
• Hiding the Elephant
• The Change Function
• Pattern Recognition

While I really enjoyed the entire weekend, the highlight was Aza Raskin’s workshop on design. He discussed the “monologue box” (aka JS alerts) along with his solution of transparent messages. His examples of undo on the web were inspirational sparking a lot of discussion. Throughout his talk he showed off Enso and though I love Quicksilver I wouldn’t mind if Humanized ported that bad boy over to the Mac! Aza talked a lot about natural language which lead to the quote of the week:

Trying to remember the command for tar -gvf is like bobbing for apples in a cement mixer.

Aza was good enough to join a handful of speakers at dinner after the show and he even tagged along for a couple of hours of pool. Good thing he and I are pretty close in skill at that particular game…though he did school me in air hockey.

Needless to say, it was a great evening and fantastic way to wrap up the conference. Neal and I did our best to recruit Aza for NFJS, he’d certainly be a welcome addition. Anyway, a great show and I’m really looking forward to next year when we’ll have not one but two opportunities to get the web community together!

As much as I agree with his post, never forget that JavaScript is JavaScript – a perfectly fine language thank you very much. It’s natural to make analogies but those can be dangerous