jQuery - Development Environments?
I'm wondering what kind of tricks and setups other people have when they
are developing with jQuery.
Be it writing some improvements to jQuery itself, or writing a plugin.
I'm not really looking for those using jQuery in an application, cause
that environment is normally just taking a few jQuery files and plugins
and including that into your existing development environment.
I'm trying to find out how people (plugin and core jQuery developers)
normally handle their development environment for working on jQuery or a
jQuery plugin.
Every time I work on another piece for jQuery, I end up creating a new
html file, which normally consists of either copying some junk from
another project and modifying it, or constructing a new one by grabbing
a doctype and a few tags off some references on the internet. I also end
up grabbing jQuery again to shove in and include.
As for actually testing stuff, I normally might just go off the
filesystem, however sometimes that doesn't quite work right, and I end
up needing to configure a local webserver (normally I just edit the
config for my local nginx).
Things get real ugly when working on patches to jQuery core itself.
Mostly because of needing to `make jquery` all the time. Sometimes I end
up sitting there for a few minutes trying to figure out "why the hell
didn't my edit fix this bug?" then realize I forgot to rebuilt jquery
before I refreshed the page to test it.
All in all, I don't really consider it a nice and clean, or even helpful
environment.
For that reason I've actually started experimenting with building a
Rails app to manage projects and streamline things like creating html
pages from templates, previewing a page and working on code live, as
well as nice integration for github forks of jQuery (fork/clone as in
gitspeak), jQuery svn, and different versions of jQuery.
--
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire)