Rewind

Origin

I started this blog a little over two weeks ago after getting stuck for an hour on a really simple Ember.js task which didn't require any knowledge that I hadn't already used successfully (or so I thought).  This was after a month of hard learning and developing!

So I threw up my hands and decided to start back at the beginning with a simple "Hello World" Ember app and explicitly test all of my assumptions about Ember setup, initialization, and various basic concepts.  And if I was going to do all that work, I might as well document it.  Thus was this blog born.

Cheatography.com — The Missing Manual

Cheatography.com is a free website for creating and sharing generic cheat sheets.  I wanted to create a cheat sheet of JavaScript value/type/object basics to release in tandem with my next post on JavaScript essentials, so I just tried using the site for the first time and found it a surprisingly painful experience.

Don't get me wrong — it's a great idea, and I'm glad Dave Child created it. Maybe I'm just spoiled by how awesome my first experience using a popular geek pet project usually is.

When I first arrived at the site and started poking around, I was confused by the concepts, the user interface, the workflow, and especially the layout options. To top it all off, the help section contained exactly one document on the one topic I actually wasn't interested in. :)

But I don't want spent a whole post bitching about free stuff and indulging in a sense of entitlement. Let's help! I present to you: Cheatography.com — The Missing Manual.

News: ember-latest.js Updated (v163)

For those of you who, like me, link some of your apps and fiddles against ember-latest.js, it's important to be aware that it was updated again a few hours ago by @wagenet.

As I explained in a similar post last week, we can check the top two lines of the file for version/build info:

Ember.js Debugging 3 — JavaScript

Photo by Nathan Smith

I already covered the console object, which is built-in to the browser and is essential for debugging your Ember apps. Today I'll review features useful for debugging in JavaScript itself.

Basic Site Improvements 2

My desire to improve the layout and features of this site has distracted me from creating new content for a few days, but I think the effort was worthwhile.

Changelog

Ember.js Debugging 2 — Firebug

Firebug is a legendarily awesome Firefox add-on with just about everything a web developer could want. It has equivalents for almost all features in the built-in tools, and much more. Although it's separate from Mozilla, they support the project. The current version is 1.10.3, which is what I have. (For non-Firefox browsers, Firebug Lite is available. I haven't tried it yet.)

Firefox vs Firebug

So why would you use the built-in tools?

Ember.js Debugging 1 — Firefox

Note: Debugging was going to part 5 of the "Tools & Resources" series, but when I started outlining it and doing additional research, it became apparent that it's simply too big a topic for that. I've instead spun it out into a separate series.

This post is about the tools built-in to Firefox which are relevant to debugging Ember.js apps. I'll be using the latest version, which is 15 as of this post.

Mozilla Development Network

The MDN site is incredible — a wealth of information about everything a web developer could want to know about the browser platform:

However, the most important section (for us) isn't linked from here — or anywhere else on the site that I could find. I had to stumble across it a different way, but now I can save you the trouble: