FireBug lets you explore the far corners of the DOM by keyboard or mouse. All of the tools you need to poke, prod, and monitor your JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Ajax are brought together into one seamless experience, including a debugger, an error console, command line, and a variety of fun inspectors.
Visit the FireBug website for documentation, screen shots, and discussion forums:
http://www.joehewitt.com/software/firebug/
A quick overview of FireBug's features:
* JavaScript debugger for stepping through code one line at a time
* Status bar icon shows you when there is an error in a web page
* A console that shows errors from JavaScript and CSS
* Log messages from JavaScript in your web page to the console (bye bye "alert debugging")
* An JavaScript command line (no more "javascript:" in the URL bar)
* Spy on XMLHttpRequest traffic
* Inspect HTML source, computed style, events, layout and the DOM
Works with:
Firefox 1.5 - 3.0 ALL
I was very frustrated doing AJAX/AHAH development until I found this tool. Firebug lets me inspect any part of the DOM I want, and it lets me look at the XMLHttpRequest and its response. This, along with Catalyst's DBIx::Class debug information from the console allows me to monitor my web application from the client presentation to network communications to server side processing to database queries and back. Pretty damned cool.
