I’m a Google-holic. I use GMail and Google Calendar religiously. One thing that always bothered me about GMail was the fact I couldn’t drag and drop my attachments into the browser. Lucky for me I found this useful Firefox extension called dragdropupload that allows me to do so.
AJAX is new technology. There aren’t very many tools supporting it compared to Java or .NET. This doesn’t mean there aren’t any good tools to develop AJAX applications however. Here are a few of my favorites which have helped me out:
Development – Eclipse + Aptana
Eclipse is the most powerful and extensible IDE I’ve ever used. It supports multiple programming languages, refactoring tools, and the works. Aptana is a plugin for Eclipse which lets you write Javascript code as well as design web-pages from within the IDE with full syntax highlighting and script debugging. Aptana also supports Adobe AIR and Ruby on Rails two new technologies that will make developing web-applications even more powerful. Putting two and two together, it leaves Dreamweaver, which is mostly a design tool, in the dust.
Eclipse can be downloaded from http://www.eclipse.org. Drop the archive anywhere on your system and run it. If you are an Ubuntu user, Eclipse is in the universe for your pleasure.
Aptana can be installed from within Eclipse if you add http://update.aptana.com/install/3.2/ as a remote site. Restart Eclipse and you are good to go.
Basic Testing – Firebug Extension for Firefox
We developers know that debugging can be the most tedious part of the programming experience. Eclipse and Aptana cover debugging the Javascript, but what about the communication between the client and the server? All AJAX applications are n-tiered and Firebug makes monitoring data between the model-view-controller a breeze. You will have to test your application in a web-browser regardless, so having Firebug installed is a bonus. You can also manipulate scripts on the fly, so if you want to make a quick CSS change to see how it affects your page thats already live, go right ahead.
Production Testing – Apache Jakarta JMeter
How do you test if your shiny new application can hold up against thousands of simultaneous users at once? JMeter is a profiling tool from Apache that lets you setup cases to stress test your application. It even provides important data like how long it took to serve a page with 50 simultaneous users, so you can fine tune your app for speed.
Deployment – FireFTP Extension for Firefox
AJAX applications live inside an HTTP server. FTPing your website is easy with FireFTP. It features a two-pane view so you can transfer your website over quick.
As AJAX becomes more popular better tools will be developed making the software process a little bit easier. The above tools mentioned are very robust so put your thinking hats on and start developing applications for the Web 2.0 generation.
If you work on multiple machines, and are anything like me – you hate re-entering your password for websites that require authorization. I have most of my passwords saved in Firefox on my home laptop, but when I visit those same sites at work I am prompted – which annoys me. Here is where Google Browser Sync comes to the rescue:
“Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.”
Now you can synchronize all of your browser settings with Google, and if all of your machines are running this Firefox extension, you can surf hassle free. Even bookmarks are saved, so no need to export from one machine to another. This extension gives you the option for encrypting your data with a personalized PIN; this even encrypts your data from Google. If you trust your data in Google’s hands then give this extension a shot (even if you don’t trust Google, they still know what you are doing – but I’ll save that for another post).
Download:
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