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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
In Detail
With the advent of RIA (Rich Internet Applications), most web pages are driven by a combination of JavaScript, AJAX, CSS, and so on. Web developers and designers find it hard to debug and fix the issues that crop up on the client side. Firebug is a wonderful toolkit to have in your arsenal for handling all such issues. This book covers all of Firebug's features and will help you utilize its capabilities with maximum efficiency. AJAX development and debugging is not one of the easiest tasks; this book explains step-by-step, how to develop and debug AJAX components in your web page in a very easy way, thereby increasing your productivity. Topics like performance tuning of the web page are covered in detail.
This book discusses how to become more efficient in various aspects of web development by using Firebug. It is a very easy-to-understand, step-by-step guide that explains all the features of Firebug with concise and simple examples. With this book in hand, you will be able to deal with the painful areas of web development like JavaScript and AJAX debugging using Firebug.
The book takes you from the basics of Web Development like editing HTML and CSS on the fly to advanced features like AJAX, JSON, Monitoring, and Performance Tuning of web pages. It assumes that you have some very basic knowledge of HTML and JavaScript. For those of you with a sound knowledge of these technologies, this book can help you increase your productivity by using Firebug effectively, taking full advantage of its rich and powerful features and the console API. Towards the end, the book explains how to create your own powerful extensions for the Firebug community.
This practical guide will equip you with the skills to edit, debug, and monitor web pages using Firebug
Approach
A step-by-step description of each key feature is provided with the help of simple, easy-to-understand examples. There are plenty of useful screenshots in each chapter. Every chapter contains information as well as tips and tricks to draw your attention towards some useful information or reference. Each aspect of web development like CSS or JavaScript is handled independently so that you can refer to those modules in which you are interested.
Who this book is for
This book is written for frontend web developers building software and pages using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and AJAX, who want to learn Firebug for the reasons outlined above. The book assumes that readers have a very basic knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The examples in the book can be understood by someone who has just been introduced to web development.
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Seitenzahl: 180
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010
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Table of Contents
Firebug 1.5: Editing, Debugging, and Monitoring Web Pages
Deepak Mittal
Chandan Luthra
Firebug 1.5: Editing, Debugging, and Monitoring Web Pages
Copyright © 2010 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, Packt Publishing, nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: April 2010
Production Reference: 1300310
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-847194-96-1
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Filippo Sarti (<[email protected]>)
Credits
Authors
Chandan Luthra
Deepak Mittal
Reviewers
Balaji D Loganathan
Michael Ratcliffe
Michael Sync
Acquisition Editor
Dilip Venkatesh
Development Editor
Dilip Venkatesh
Technical Editors
Gaurav Datar
Rukhsana Khambatta
Copy Editor
Sanchari Mukherjee
Indexer
Hemangini Bari
Editorial Team Leader
Gagandeep Singh
Project Team Leader
Lata Basantani
Project Coordinator
Poorvi Nair
Proofreader
Aaron Nash
Graphics
Geetanjali G. Sawant
Production Coordinator
Adline Swetha Jesuthas
Cover Work
Adline Swetha Jesuthas
About the Authors
Chandan Luthra is a Software Development Engineer with IntelliGrape Software, New Delhi, India—a company specializing in Groovy/Grails development. He is an agile and pragmatic programmer and an active participant at local open source software events, where he evangelizes Groovy, Grails, Jquery, and Firebug. Chandan is a Linux and open source enthusiast. He also involves himself in writing blogs and is an active member on various tech-related mailing lists. He has developed web applications for various industries, including entertainment, finance, media and publishing, as well as others.
He loves to share his knowledge and good coding practices with other team members in order to hone their development skills. In his free time, he loves to contribute to open source technologies.
Chandan also loves to code in jQuery and Firebug, which makes development very easy for him. He is a very fond user of Firebug and has been using it since 2007.
I would like to thank my family for their love and support during my far-flung adventures into esoteric nonsense. Thanks also to all my cooperative colleagues at IntelliGrape for their feedback and suggestions. I would also like to thank Deepak Mittal for co-authoring and motivating me to write this book. Finally, I wish to thank Dilip Venkatesh (Acquisition Editor at Packt), Poorvi Nair (Project Coordinator at Packt), Micheal Sync (Reviewer), Micheal Ratcliffe (Reviewer), and Balaji Loganathan (Reviewer) for giving a perfect shape to this book. Special thanks to S. Vivek Krishna for his help on the Preface of the book.
Deepak Mittal is a software developer based in New Delhi, India, and he has been involved with software engineering and web programming in Java/JEE world since the late 1990s. Deepak is a Linux and open source enthusiast. He is an agile practitioner and speaks about open source, agile processes, and free software at various user group meetings and conferences. He has designed and built web applications for industries including pharmaceutical, travel, media, and publishing, as well as others. He loves to explore new technologies and has been an early-adopter of quite a few mainstream technologies of today's world.
In early 2008, he co-founded IntelliGrape Software, an agile web application development company focused on Groovy and Grails. At IntelliGrape, he has been occupied with building world class applications on Grails and also mentors and trains other team members.
Deepak is a veteran user of Firebug and has been using it since 2006.
I want to thank all my colleagues at IntelliGrape for their valuable feedback and suggestions, my family for putting up without me for weeks, and all the contributors of Firebug. My special thanks go to Dilip Venkatesh (Acquisition Editor at Packt), Poorvi Nair (Project Coordinator at Packt), Chandan Luthra (my co-author), and all the reviewers of the book.
About the Reviewers
Balaji D Loganathan has 10+ years of experience in the software field, is a CEO and Co-founder of Spritle Software—a software development company in Chennai, India. Balaji is an Agile Guru specializing in Agile Offshore, a Certified Scrum Master. Balaji has a Master's degree in IT from the RMIT, Australia and a Bachelors Degree in Engineering from the Annamalai University, India.
When Michael Ratcliffe was 9 years old he saw a movie called "Wargames". Like many kids his age he became very interested in computers. A few weeks later he was playing "Roland in the Caves" on a friend's Amstrad CPC 464 when the game crashed and the command prompt displayed "Illegal Operation." Believing that he had hacked something, he decided that he wanted to become a full time hacker and therefore became much more determined to learn how computers work and what can be done with them.
At 12 years of age, his parents bought him an Acorn Electron Microcomputer as a Christmas present. Within 6 months he had written his first game, Wargames, in BBC Basic. By the time he was 14, he was regularly writing programs in 6502 Assembly language and would regularly send pokes (infinite lives, invulnerability, and so on) to computer magazines to help people with their new games.
At 15 years of age, he started work in IT as a support engineer. His use of programming languages extended to Turbo C, C++, Pascal, Delphi, C#, VB, VBScript, VB.NET, HTML, JavaScript, ASP, PHP, Perl, and so on. Some years later he discovered that he was spending a large amount of time writing tools to help his colleagues with their work and decided that he should get the paper qualifications he would need. He started as a computer science major but, after receiving a ton of job offers in the field, he just dropped out of university and has been professional ever since.
Michael is currently working for Comartis AG, Switzerland on e-Learning software called i-qbox Human Performance Suite. He works daily with VB.NET, C#, and JavaScript but prefers JavaScript, claiming that its quirks just make the language more fun. As the "JavaScript Guy" he uses Firebug to get his work done properly. In 2008 he began logging Firebug issues and soon began spending lots of time fixing bugs to make his work easier. He worked for a time on Firebug Lite but spends most of his "spare time" now working on improving the Firebug Inspector, which he likes to think of as "Aardvark on Steroids."
He would like to thank his wife Sabine for her patience during the many hours spent performing technical reviews on this book.
Michael Sync has lately been associated with Memolife as a Solution Architect, responsible for building their products using Silverlight and other .Net technologies.
Prior to venturing into this, he was creating a niche in Web Application Development using ASP.NET, AJAX, JavaScript, and so on.
He had always believed in the concept of "Sharing Knowledge", which is the key to building his in-depth understanding of the technology. That's the main reason why he always tries to participate in public forums and local newsgroups for helping fellow technologists; benefits are also received, as learning is a two-way process.
Being a member of Microsoft WPF/Silverlight Insider team, he really enjoys playing with early drops of Silverlight and giving his feedback to the team.
Preface
Firebug is a free and open source tool, available as a Mozilla Firefox extension, which allows debugging, editing, and monitoring of any website's CSS, HTML, DOM, XHR, and JavaScript. Firebug 1.0 beta was released in December 2006. Firebug usage has grown very quickly since then. Approximately 1.3 million users have Firebug installed as of January 2009. It is a very popular tool among web developers to aid during web application development.
The book begins with the steps to install Firebug, followed by an overview of the Firebug window. We will get the basic idea of Firebug and movement across the different panels and tabs within Firebug.
From there, we will make our way towards more advanced usages of each tab, such as CSS development, JavaScript development, and DOM modification. This will aid us during client-side development and debugging of RIAs. We will also learn to use Firebug for performance tuning our application on the browser. We have also dealt with the tracking of XMLHttpRequest and XMLHttpResponse during AJAX development, which is also an integral part of RIAs. We will also learn a few tips and tricks for Firebug that will help us in configuring Firebug according to our taste and make it a pleasurable experience to work with it.
Once we are comfortable with the usage of Firebug, we will learn to install and use some popular Firebug extensions. This will be followed by a discussion on how to develop our own Firebug extension.
What this book covers
Chapter 1: Getting Started with Firebug gives a quick introduction to Firebug, its origin and history, who should use Firebug, and a glimpse of Firebug's main features, hoping that this will spark your interest in both Firebug and the rest of this book.
Chapter 2: Firebug Window Overview explains Firebug's tabs and what they are used for.
Chapter 3: Inspecting and Editing HTML provides an understanding of using Firebug to inspect, edit, search, and play with the HTML source of the document.
Chapter 4: CSS Development aims to help the reader to understand the useful tools and utilities provided by Firebug for CSS development.
Chapter 5: JavaScript Development explains command line API, console API of Firebug, and debugging JavaScript in detail.
Chapter 6: Knowing your DOM gives a small introduction to DOM as well as discussing how to modify/edit values of properties and constants of any DOM object using Firebug.
Chapter 7: Performance Tuning Our Web Application explains various ways to analyze the performance of your web application on the browser.
Chapter 8: AJAX Development discusses how to track XmlHttpRequest and XmlHttpResponse as well as debugging AJAX calls.
Chapter 9: Tips and Tricks for Firebug discusses a few tips and tricks that can be very useful while debugging and developing. We have explained how to play with the features that Firebug provides and what other things you should know about Firebug.
Chapter 10: Necessary Firebug Extensions explains some of the Firebug extensions, such as YSlow, FireCookie, Page Speed, and so on. They are useful for development and performance tuning.
Chapter 11: Extending Firebug discusses the steps to develop a Firebug extension. We have also discussed how to set up a development environment, along with file and directory structure for the extension.
Appendix, A Quick overview of Firebug's features and options gives a quick reference for various Firebug features and options.
What you need for this book
We will need Mozilla Firefox v 3.5 - 3.6 installed on our systems. We also need Firebug 1.4 - 1.5 installed on top of it. The latter is not a prerequisite as we will discuss how to install it during the course of the book.
Having an Internet connection would be an added advantage as the examples provided run on top of live websites. This will also help us in learning to install and use Firebug extensions.
Who this book is for
The target audience is front-end web developers who are building software and pages using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and AJAX, and want to learn Firebug. The book assumes that the reader has a very basic knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The examples in the book can be understood by someone who has just been introduced to web development.
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Questions
You can contact us at <[email protected]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.
Chapter 1. Getting Started with Firebug
In this chapter, we will have a quick introduction to Firebug—its origin and history, who should use Firebug, and a glimpse of Firebug's main features. Hopefully this will spark your interest in both Firebug and the rest of this book. We will also look at how to install Firebug on several browsers and the different modes in which Firebug can be opened.
In this chapter, we will look at the following:
What is Firebug?
Firebug is a free, open source tool that is available as a Mozilla Firefox extension, and allows debugging, editing, and monitoring of any website's CSS, HTML, DOM, and JavaScript. It also allows performance analysis of a website. Furthermore, it has a JavaScript console for logging errors and watching values. Firebug has many other tools to enhance the productivity of today's web developer.
Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at our fingertips while we browse a website. Firebug allows us to understand and analyze the complex interactions that take place between various elements of any web page when it is loaded by a browser.
