Shawson's Code Blog

Well put together, and generally good advice about the finer details of javascript (closures, truthy values) for someone starting out.

http://taitems.github.com/Front-End-Development-Guidelines/

…cannot be done with the built in dev tools, as I reminded myself today.  I guess my memory painted a fonder picture of the first version of the IE debugger than it deserved.  I’ve been using the IE8 debugger a lot of late as I’m working on a very JS heavy UI targeted primarily at IE users, which has some firebug-esque features, like break points/ profiling etc and I foolishly assumed such things were always there, because a web debugger without these tools wouldn’t be much use..

Anyway turns out all is not lost- after wading through a bunch of rubbish solutions I eventually found  an awesome profiler (for free, of course!) which works with IE 6, 7 & 8!  Check it out- “DynaTrace AJAX Edition“

Update 2011.03.03
@rikarends from the Cloud9 team was nice enough to chat to me on Skype about my windows woes and I’m reliably informed that the Windows chunk of Cloud9 still needs a little polishing and will be up to scratch in a future release; you can follow them on twitter for news (@Cloud9IDE) – in the mean time older branches from GitHub should run fine (v0.2.0)- in the mean time you can always run their most up to date version from their hosted service at http://c9.io

I did have some trouble with this though- I ran git command to download the project to my computer, no probs, then ran the run batch file (I’m on Win7 x64) and this ran about half way then died with this little beauty;

Failed to recurse into submodule path 'support/ace'

… All looked a bit bleak for a moment- did a bit of Googling and found other people had had this issue- dug through the launch script and found the command that gets fired on first time launch which seems to get a bunch of support packages from Git- this seems to be what failed- I CD’ed into the cloud9 folder and manually re-ran that get

git submodule update --init --recursive

And it seems second time’s the charm- everything finished downloading– that’s not to say I got it running!  Also found a problem in the batch file which starts it up in bin/cloud9-win32.bat – the use of EQ on the if conditions broke the script so I adjusted line 9 to;

IF NOT %ERRORLEVEL%==0 goto exit

and line 18 to;

IF %ERRORLEVEL%==0 goto exit

Now it manages to make it through the script only to say

E:\cloud9\cloud9>bin\cloud9-win32.bat
------ Starting Cloud9 server ------
"Something failed unfortunately, please try a clean clone"
Press any key to continue . . .

Digging into the script once more the command which gets fired to launch it is;

start support\node-builds\win32\node bin/cloud9.js -a "cmd /c start"

So I launched this without the “start” at the command line and the underlying error is;

E:\cloud9\cloud9>support\node-builds\win32\node bin/cloud9.js -a "cmd /c start"
2 Mar 21:05:17 - socket.io ready - accepting connections

                           Ajax.org Cloud9 IDE
                              version 0.2.0
Project root is:
Trying to start your browser in: http://localhost:undefined

So port undefined is obviously no use; I mod the batch script again to specify a port- in bin\cloud9-win32.bat line 16 I change to;

start support\node-builds\win32\node bin/cloud9.js -p 3000 -a "cmd /c start"

This sets the default port to 3000 and relaunching the batch file actually now fires it up- but still it doesn’t work. The browser lauches and I can see bits of the top menu from the UI- however in the accompanying console window I get spammed with errors such as;

Error: Command failed: execvp(): No such file or directory

    at ChildProcess.exithandler (child_process:80:15)
    at ChildProcess.emit (events:27:15)
    at Stream. (child_process:148:12)
    at Stream.emit (events:27:15)
    at Array.0 (net:1004:12)
    at EventEmitter._tickCallback (node.js:55:22)
    at node.js:772:9

I give up! If any one gets futher, please drop me a comment!