Atf? Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms? All The Fun? No! JavaScript, Ajax and DHTML editor and debugger…
Let me unveil a well kept secret: a gem project @ Eclipse : the ATF project.
Despite its non-descriptive weirdo name, this little sub-incubating project of the larger web tools project provides some nice stuffs:
- a fairly decent (in fact freaking awesome) JavaScript editor, pretty close to reach the holiness of the Java editor. This is not the standard basic web tools editor but a brand new advanced editor
- support to add and manage JavaScript libraries (such as Prototype, Dojo, mootols, Rico, Yui, pick your own ). It is library agnostic and friendly.
- live in-Eclipse preview of HTML and JavaScript pages in Firefox
- in-browser JavaScript debugger, integrated with the Eclipse debug framework. You can debug JavaScripts the same way you debug Java!
- in-browser DOM inspection, live snippets eval, and manipulations
- XmlHttpRequest monitoring, for Ajax troubleshooting
Part of the magic is achieved by embedding a Mozilla Firefox browser in Eclipse (aka Xulrunner), and having a Java API to control that browser. (no more status, title or location hacks madness ). The Mozilla embedding works on Windows, Mac and Linux. And it was so freaking cool, that after being piloted in the ATF project, it made it’s way as a standard SWT feature of Eclipse 3.3/Europa.
Get a taste of ATF there. Try the all in one drop, you just need to add a JVM.
Kick in the tires, file bugs, suggest new features. Bring back the fun to JavaScript coding.
So, despite the ugly name: ATF is NOT a JavaScript or Ajax framework. Well some would say that a good piece of code does not need a name. I think the opposite. Now what does ATF mean? This is your call. Let’s pick a new name! Join the fun with new names ideas here on the webtools.atf newsgroup.
Posted October 2nd, 2007 by Philippe Ombredanne in category: ajax, atf, debug, eclipse, editor, javascript
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2 Responses to “Atf? Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms? All The Fun? No! JavaScript, Ajax and DHTML editor and debugger…”
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Eugene Kuleshov Says:
October 2nd, 2007 at 21:51
What been bugging me about ATF is why does it need to be built on top of WTP?
Philippe Ombredanne Says:
October 3rd, 2007 at 7:07
I think this is historic.
At start there were no editors. So JavaScript, CSS and HTML were provided by WTP.
The new JavaScript editor is based on a JDT fork.
But still no CSS or HTML. It relies on WTP base editors.
I think that there absolutely no reason to build it on top of WTP code, and have tight coupling.
The fact that the project is part of WTP, and the fact that WTP components are tightly coupled or not should not be linked.
I sometimes feel that WTP is way too monolithic.
Note that for now, ATF depends only on a very small subset of the WST (non J2EE part of WTP).