Get Firebug Now! (Because Debuggers Are Awesome)

If you already know Firebug inside and out, feel free to move along. You already know how awesome it is.

OK, now that the know-it-alls are gone... I have to tell you that the other week I had another one of those "giant step ahead" moments in my development career. I used a step-through debugger for the first time (Firebug). I wouldn't admit this in public if it weren't for the fact that I think admitting it will help other people to take that step too.

I was having a hell-of-a time with a particular page. There was a lot of JavaScript going on on this page including validation and chained AJAX calls. Anyway, the page was, in some circumstances, throwing a JS slow-running script error across browsers. I actually tried for some time to put in alerts, comment out portions, etc. like I normally do. This was not working.

So, I said, "I think now is the time to check out the Firebug break-point thing". I went over to http://www.getfirebug.com and scanned the portion about the debugger. I set a break-point in a method above where I knew the slowness was occurring. Firebug, having paused the JS execution at that point, also showed me what data was being passed into the method. With the ability to see the data and step through line-by-line, it wasn't long until I found what was wrong. (Some records in our db have a guid for their email. And the regex for our email validation choked on them).

Here' my point: It is so much easier to debug JS with the proper tool that I am looking forward to the next tricky JS error!

Firebug is an amazing tool! I've been using it for a while for testing and debugging AJAX calls. I also use it to help figure out CSS issues quickly. If you don't know that you can edit your html and CSS, debug JS, monitor network activity and much more with Firebug, then you owe it to yourself to go read about it. I know now that not having done this earlier was penny-wise and dollar foolish on my part.

You can come back and thank me for the kick in the pants later. :-)