At work, I’m starting on a new Intranet site for the company, and one thing I am really wanting to do is ramp up my JavaScript skills in the process so I can make a large part of it AJAX driven. I’ve played with it a bit in the past, and with the awesome Prototype class as well, but up until now it hasn’t been anything more glamorous than hiding and displaying pockets of information.
I’ve been doing some reading up the past few days, and stumbled upon some great resources. One really cool thing I found, that I’ll write about later since I’ve got some ebuilds in the works, is GNOME Seed. Seed is, basically, JavaScript bindings for GTK+. In other words, you can build GUI applications in JavaScript. How freaking cool is that? (For the curious, read this, this and this.)
Anyway, one part of doing my research about JavaScript is building a little toolkit of common functions that I can use as a fallback when I need to understand what’s going on. I’m really familiar with PHP, so I’ve been using that as a sort of inspiration.
I’ve got a little function I wrote, called var_dump(), which basically does the same thing as the PHP function, and with similar syntax output. The code is here. If any JavaScript gurus wants to look at it and give me some pointers, let me know. I’d appreciate it. 🙂 Mine is making a call to Seed, but obviously it’d be easy enough to put into a browser.