Ajax Performance

Worst. Santa. Ever.

At my parents’ house in Charleston for Christmas, and someone broke into our garage and pilfered our cars. The only thing they stole was my iPod, but I need to get a replacement before making the 16 hour drive back to Boston.

Despite that annoyance, Merry Christmas to all! I have a number of updates I’ve queued up to post, and my New Years resolution is to clear that buffer.

Jash: An alternative to Firebug Lite

I hadn’t heard of Jash until today, but it’s a nice alternative to Firebug Lite for cross browser console debugging. What I like:

• Jash can be added to a page via bookmarklet, so you can use it on pages you don’t own. This is a fun technique for analyzing the architecture of other sites, and Jash makes it easy to do this in multiple browsers. It’s possible to tweak Firebug Lite to do something similar, but I appreciate that bookmarklet support works out of the box for Jash.
• The bookmarklet approach can also be used to inject libraries into any site, allowing you to explore each page with the benefit of JQuery, Dojo, or Yui, for example.

I use Firebug Lite a lot, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that it’s an afterthought, at least next to the brilliance of Firebug proper. A tool like Jash demonstrates that there’s more room for innovation in the cross browser debug space.