ReadWriteHack

For most of its existence, Firebug has been the de facto JavaScript developers' console for Firefox; and for several years, most Web development in general involved Firebug to at least some extent. Now with HTML5 developers expecting to see more workbench functionality built into the browser, Firefox finds itself in yet another chase, this time not only with Google Chrome but with Opera and Microsoft Internet Explorer, in a race to incorporate functionality that Firebug users had always thought they had.

Mozilla's latest nightly build of Aurora, the development channel for Firefox, reveals the incorporation of at least one new feature in its growing built-in dev toolkit that, while welcomed, will already look familiar to some who've sneaked into the Chrome camp: a "bread crumbs" toolbar that represents the relationships between page divisions in the active DOM model, and lets you click on a division name to see it isolated in the browser.

Are you an iOS developer thinking about dipping your toe into the Android pool? If so, you should read developer Nick Farina's post about his experience developing on Android after developing on iOS.

Farina compares the development environment (he writes that you'll hate Eclipse at first, but once you get used to it "you'll enjoy some seriously amazing, productivity-boosting code completion, refactoring, and automatic fixing."), provides slick side-by-side code comparisons (spoiler: Java and Objective-C look a lot alike) and addresses the fragmentation issue.

Chop is a new tool for adding quick comments to code. Here's the pitch: "Giving quick, one-off feedback on code is a pain. Code review tools are complex, expensive, and hard to use. Often we just want to share a quick contextual note with someone who may not have access to the entire code base."

With Chop, you paste in some code, and then add quick a comment and share it.

giter8 is "a command line tool to generate files and directories from templates published on github." Its written in Scala on top of the Simple Build Tool, but you don't need to be a Scala hacker to use it.

You can find a list of existing templates here.

In a blog post Pavel Feldman explains how to use WebKit Web Inspector outside of the target browser. WebKit Inspector can communicate with WebKit-based browsers through the Remote Debugging Protocol, providing a debugging environment very similar to the one found locally.

Some reasons to use Web Inspector this way include debugging mode applications and IDE integration. However, from what I can tell, Safari on iOS and Chrome on Android don't yet support the Remote Debugging Protocol.

Microsoft has released the second beta of its open source Python Tools plugin for Visual Studio. It gives developers the ability code in Python, CPython and IronPython from within Visual Studio. It's available under the Apache 2.0 license.

Showoff is a simple service that lets you use your local computer as a file server over the Internet. You install the software (a Ruby gem), specify a folder or file using the "Share" command and then get a URL for sharing the location - ie, https://you.showoff.io. It's only available for Unix-based operating systems like OSX and Linux. There is now Windows version, but it might be possible to get it working with Cygwin. Update: Showoff requires a work Web server already be running.

PageKite offers a similar service (this one based on Python), and has open-sourced its code. It is available for Windows, OSX and Linux.

"Apple had about 2.06 percent of the US desktop market in 2003. By 2010, OS X had about 10.9% of the market," writes Github developer Zach Holman. "There's a slew of reasons for this growth, but I think a large part of it is the migration of software developers from Windows to OS X starting in the early 2000's. Attracted by the reasonable UNIX toolchain and the straightforward usability approach, more and more geeks adopted OS X as their primary machines."

But there's always been a blight in developing on OSX under languages other than Cocoa, and that's compiler support. In order to get gcc, developers have had to download Xcode. According to to Holman, this wasn't a big deal back when X-Code was less than 500MB. But now Xcode costs $5 from the Apple App Store, and it's a 4.5GB download that takes up 15GB once installed.

PhantomJS gives you command-line access to the features of WebKit. According to its website: "Literally it acts like any other WebKit-based web browser, except that nothing gets displayed to the screen (thus, the term headless)." It has native support for DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, SVG, and JavaScript.

You can use to test JavaScript, render Web pages as PDFs or perform more complex Web-based actions such as finding recent tweets by a particular Twitter user.

Greplin, the company behind the universal search tool we covered last year, has open-sourced several tools for Tornado and Twisted, such as Tornado clients for sending e-mail with Amazon SES and SendGrid.

Tornado is the non-blocking Web server built with Python by FriendFeed, and Twited is a Python-based event-driven networking engine.