Gliffy
Add Gliffy to your arsenal of online office products. Gliffy is an online application for creating diagrams similar to those in Visio. You can create UML, ERD, flow charts and more. I’ve only used it a bit so far, but I think it looks great. I’m always looking for online alternatives to desktop office products. And Gliffy allows limited usage for free. Anyone else using this?
Web Power Tool #5 - Selenium IDE (Firefox Add-on)
For Firefox users only. Selenium IDE is a Firefox add-on that lets you record, playback, edit and debug tests in your Firefox browser. You can even make assertions within your tests. I have been using Selenium IDE to playback standard tests that I execute after making changes to my applications. Selenium IDE is actually part of the bigger Selenium product. You can read more about it on the Selenium/Selenium IDE Web site.
Web Power Tool #4 - Nvu
Nvu is a high quality Web authoring system for Linux, Windows and the Mac. I like Nvu because it is open source and has a very nice WYSIWYG HTML editor. I use Nvu for prototyping HTML pages when developing dynamic Web sites, as well as maintaining static HTML Web sites. If you used Mozilla’s Composer HTML editor in the past, you might recognize some of the features in Nvu. Nvu was started using the Composer code base.
I was concerned about Nvu, because there has not been an update since the middle of 2005. On the Nvu Web site FAQ, I see that Nvu is “being completely redone to take advantage of new features in the Firefox development branch”. Another encouraging sign is that the support forum is very active. I’m looking forward to the next release as I assume it will work with Firefox in one way or another.
Web Power Tool #3 - Firebug (Firefox Add-on)
For Firefox users only. I finally got a chance to play with Firebug. I can see why so many developers are falling in love with this tool. To start off with, Firebug is a tool that make working with HTML, CSS and JavaScript a lot easier. It allows you to monitor, edit and debug your Web pages while they are live in the browser. It also allows you to move your mouse over a HTML page to inspect the DOM elements within the page.
One of my favorite feature is how easy you can switch between “inspect” and “edit” modes. Another very cool feature is the network monitor. Switch to the network monitor and then click on a link in your page. Watch all of the network calls being made, how long they take and how much bandwidth they use. I think this is going to quickly become one of the most used tools in my toolbox.
Web Power Tool #2 - Web Developer (Firefox Add-on)
For Firefox users only. This Firefox add-on adds a toolbar to your browser that is packed with tools that make your life easier when working with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Images and more.
My favorite two features are the resize tool that lets you easily resize your browser to a size of your choice and the HTML editor that lets you modify your HTML on the fly.
Web Power Tool #1 - Mouseover DOM
This is the beginning article in a new blog series I am writing titled, “Web Power Tools”. This series is going to feature very cool and useful tools for building Web applications. Feel free to leave comments and let me know about cool tools you are using as well.
The first tool I am featuring in this series is Mouseover DOM. This tool is simply a bookmark to a JavaScript library back at http://slayeroffice.com that you add to your browser. Firefox and IE6+ are both supported in addition to other browsers. To use the tool, simply click on the bookmark and the Mouseover DOM window will pop up. You must allow popup windows for this to work. The window will then display the current DOM element along with its properties and values. You then move your mouse over each element on your page you want to see the properties for.
This tool has saved me a lot of time working with JavaScript and CSS. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
Finding Bugs Can Be Fun
Scheduled to do a Java code review for one of your teammates? Grab a copy of FindBugs and analyze her/his code beforehand. You will be the hit of the code review, however, your teammate will definitely not be buying you a beer after work.
Actually, FindBugs is very useful and finds all sorts of things that could cause you problems that you may not have even known were issues. You may not care about all of the bugs it finds, but every now and then you will find one and say “oooh, that is bad”. Best of all, FindBugs is easy to setup and to run.
What are you waiting for? That code review is scheduled to start in 15 minutes.