Browser as a Development Tool

Introduction

Yes, in this modern day of CSS and JavaScript, you will be productive when you choose a good browser with excellent integrated developer tools. Remember your WebObjects application responds to requests from the browser and delivers back the responses. The browser ultimately interprets your response and displays it and interacts with it. So, it is critical that you fully embrace learning when it comes to basic http protocol, http headers, the DOM, semantic HTML, CSS, javascript, etc. Unbelievably there are WebObjects developers who think they can get by knowing just java and the WebObjects Dynamic Elements and Extension WOComponents! Read on for how to get the most development productivity out of the popular browsers.

Using a Different Browser than your Default for WebObjects Development

In many cases, the browser you might prefer for every-day web surfing might not be the same one you want to use for development. Getting a specific browser to launch your WebObjects app URL when you run it from Eclipse is easy. Here is an example of how to make your WebObjects apps always launch with FireFox as the browser on your development machine:

• Replace the soft link file at this path with a bash script to launch your URL
• /System/Library/WebObjects/Executables/WOOpenURL

The script should look like this:

#!/bin/bash

# Open argument  with firefox
/usr/bin/open -a /Applications/Firefox.app $1

FireFox

FireFox is a great platform for development. Its extensive array of develop plugins make it an ideal companion to the WebObjects developer. Get it here: http://getfirefox.com/

Developer Plugins

These are sorted in order of usefulness (IMHO )

WebKit