If you’re not using Scriptaculous yet, start using it!

And once you do, you can reference this awesome Scriptaculous Cheat Sheet designed by Amy Hoy of Slash7.  She did a great job at covering the basics, keeping it simple.

Jenny posted about an interesting article over at Particletree called Levels of Web Development Knowledge. My favorite article, which I was cracking up over, was Dean Edwards’ Levels of JavaScript Knowledge, which actually has 6 variants of JavaScript Hello World code to demonstrate 6 levels of JavaScript developer expertise. I love it!

It’s fun because, if you’ve been in the business for a bit, you can look at the levels and recall when you were there. Of course, the new kids coming into the business are learning the modern methods up front and may have never even coded in the lower levels. For a while, though, there was no better way to do things reliably. JavaScript support has come a long way recently.

I’m only at level 5 right now, but I’ve been aware of level 6, trying to wrap my brain around it, and will hopefully begin coding in that manner soon.

No, I’m not saying you should get rid of your JavaScript. Just dump it.
Of course, I’m referring to dumping elements to the screen to help you debug and inspect data while developing an application. Have you ever wondered what precisely is going on inside that JavaScript array or struct, since you’re not getting the output you expect? In the ColdFusion world, cfdump is invaluable for this kind of thing.

Well, the Net Grow folks have developed an awesome JavaScript Dump method that behaves very similar to ColdFusion’s dump functionality. Awesome! This is definitely a must-have.

I just got wind of Aptana today. At first glance, I would describe Aptana as a new IDE focused on web development, especially with an eye to Web 2.0 development. In other words, it has strong support for JavaScript-oriented code insight for AJAX development.

Aptana’s strength, then, from what I can see in some of the screencasts, is that is supports HTML and JavaScript and CSS all in the same editor, providing outline insight and even error detection with all the code intermixed. This seemed pretty nice.

Being that it is still in its infancy, I’m hard-pressed to try it at this time. After all, Eclipse can do most of what Aptana claims to do with various plugins, and much more. The thing, though, is that Aptana is also offered as a plugin for Eclipse itself. I actually just downloaded JSEclipse and the ATF today, but if I find these mediocre, maybe Aptana would be worth a closer look.