Debugging JS w/ATF under eclipse - large DOM issue?

[mendosoft]

I'm kind of new to JS in detail, but need to get a good debugging environment to step through client side code. No problem - Eclipse has ATF, which is now installed and fully functional - very nice!

But, since the OX GUI is implemented as a SINGLE very large DOM object (ox.html) with the client side event engine turning on different views, etc., it debugs VERY slowly under ATF.

I actually think the slow ATF problem is when ATF tries to keep track of all the JS data structures and DOM manipulation stuff in the "Variables" tab under the Eclipse debugger - it seems like it bogs down trying to track the large amount of data...at least this is my speculation. Note that stepping through code is fine, but is slowed down as the variables are tracked and rendered in Eclipse.

Anybody have any ideas? Cut down the size of the ox.html (not really feasible)? Turn off the variable tracking in Eclipse (not desired)? Use some other JS debugger (though ATF seems to be the standard for Eclipse-based development)?

Great stuff - thanks.

My primary OX platform: OS-X Tiger v10.4.9

[Martin Heiland]

Firebug may be an alternative. It is a addon for Mozilla Firefox and offers some nice debugging/tracking features for html/css/js and works quite fast. I don't know if this is a alternative to you.

[mendosoft]

Thx a bunch - Firebug is perfect for my needs!

FYI - I downloaded Firebug and it's just what I needed. Much easier than ATF from what my experience, though if ATF didn't get bogged down with large DOMs (my suspicion - not proven on my part) it'd be a good tool inside Eclipse which is nice.

But with Firebug, I can debug the entire OX gui which, BTW, is a cool piece of JS code that controls nav, events, modules, menus, etc. It's not easy to learn (I'm still doing so...), but with Firebug it's a LOT easier since you can see the DOM, step throught, etc.

Thx again OX!

[Martin Heiland]

Firebug is also the prefered tool of most GUI developers and QA (great to track down caching problems, css issues or javascript-debugging and -reporting).

If some other are interested in this nice and free piece of software you should look at: http://www.getfirebug.com/

Ah, well and if you are interested on the xpath skeleton of the groupware you may use some other shiny plugins like xpather (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1192) or the allmighty Mozilla DOM-Inspector (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/inspector/). With the DOM inspector you can access elements without disabling the right-click blocking of the GUI. This is one major problem for debugging tools that use the context menu.