AJAX-Tools
Internet Explorer is definitely not the darling of Ajax developers. The different issues any developer would have to face in building Ajax for IE would mean extra work. Although the number of IE users are lesser compared to what it was 5 years ago, the fact that more than half of the world’s internet users use only IE forces the developers to do some back breaking work.
Fortunately, the upcoming IE8 might mean the end of our coding problems. Microsoft has announced that it is aiming to go with the universal standards of coding. That means an Ajax based coding for Firefox will also work in IE, cutting down the problems any Ajax based developer would face.
To aide the developers in building their application smoothly and correctly, they have to use different tools for ease of development. The following are the most popular development tools for IE:
IE Developer Toolbar – Think of it like the Firefox extension debugging tool. One of its main differences though is that it can load independently from the web browser or could be integrated to IE. For Ajax developers its notable function is the IE setting wherein developers can easily set the caching functions for IE. This application was specifically built by Microsoft for IE developers. It comes in free and could be easily loaded in the browser.
IEDocMon – Developed by Tim Tabor, this open source tool for IE is your stripped down and simplified version of very expensive IE toolbars today. Community support for the toolbar is very wide so any problem that you might find in using the application will always have an answer. If you are running a simple Ajax based application, you can use this to check the events, functions and elements. IEDocMon displays the actual coding so that you will see how the function could be integrated to the whole application.
IE WebDeveloper V2 – For robust applications, IE WebDeveloper V2 fits the description in aiding the developers to build the application properly. This tool has a slew of applications that checks every line for possible errors. Ajax developer could easily use this since it can easily monitor JavaScript functions in your application.
The source code of JavaScript could also be monitored without any problem. You can easily display them in tree-display mode so that you will see the hierarchy and relationship of one function to another. The downside of this tool is that it is not free. So if you are willing to shell out some funds, this tool will work great for you.
Microsoft Visual Studio – We have saved the best for last as Microsoft itself has released a library specific for Ajax and along with it a good debugging tool. Of course this application is not free but the ease it could give any developer for Ajax is worth it. Do not just get any Visual Studio release though; only Visual Studio 8 have been optimized by Microsoft to have the ability to debug Ajax-based application because of its remarkable debugging ability for JavaScript.
