The purpose of this article is to provide a list of advanced debugging techniques that are not easily found elsewhere on the web. Using Google to search for JavaScript debugging just gives you hundreds of articles about using alerts and how Firebug works. We all worship at the altar of Firebug, but there are things that can go beyond a console.log(). The following is a list of methods that every developer should have in their toolbox.

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I was first exposed to metaclass programming through JavaScript, though I didn’t realize it. When I started digging into the guts of Django’s ORM system, I learned how metaclass programming in Python worked and discovered I’d been doing something similar in JavaScript for a while.

So what is it? Some great articles on metaclass programming turn up in Google and are worth a read. But for those of you that would rather just get down to business, I’ll try to summarize the idea really quickly, focusing on what we’re going to be able to do with Javascript.

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There was a lot of activity in the Dojo Toolkit community this week, including an update for Dojo Storage plus articles on productivity and writing DRYer code.

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It’s not very often that I get to work on some software that has the potential to appeal to developers, testers, designers, and the marketing team all at once. And of course when I do get to work on something like that, it usually means there is a significant amount of pressure to get it done and done quickly. My work on dojox.analytics has been one of those rare instances when I’ve been able to work in peace on writing simple and useful code that can entertain a wide variety of use cases.

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Over the past few years designing and developing I’ve come to rely on a number of tools. Most of these are obvious like Photoshop and Firebug, however I’ve come to realize that a few tools I use aren’t as well known.

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I was never a fan of the way Dojo 0.4.x handled debugging. Sans an available console, the debugger would dump text all over the page. Dojo 0.9 no longer uses dojo.debug in favor of Firebug’s world class debugger. Because Dojo 0.4.x wrapped, extended, and essentially hid Firebug’s console, some 0.9 adopters may be even wonder what console.log is. When porting to 0.9 and doing the obligatory fishing: where did that function go, what do they call it, and is it still there?… inevitably, the first function you look for is dojo.debug, and you come across the console object in firebug.js. Dojo.firebug is a port of Firebug Lite. What this means is that if you are viewing your app on a browser without Firebug, not only will you not get runtime errors, but you’ll get a debugger… actually a console! No more messy text all over my page. Just another reason why Dojo rocks.

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