The Depressing State of IE Development Tools

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, August 6, 2007 @ 5:47 am

A while back I contributed a chapter on Ajax optimization to Real-World AJAX, and as a part of that effort I did quite a bit of digging around for tools to do profiling in IE. The pickings were slim. Now whenever a new book on Ajax comes along, I take it as a point of professional interest to check out its section on profiling and optimization, and so far the lack of progress in tools for IE is depressing. What a contrast, though, between Firefox and IE: while Firefox now has a souped up FireBug and the venerable Venkman, IE's got the same old developer tool-bar, the script debugger and various HTTP proxies to debug XHR and other requests. Of course there's always Visual Studio. Blech. How many virtual machines can you run with IE6 + VS, IE7 + VS? I need a 6GB laptop to get reasonable performance, and even then I don't get profiling.

So, what are the options for profiling code in IE?

• Tito Web Studio - the old commercial standby. Gets the job done, but be prepared to fork out ~$200 per developer.
• IEWatch - new commercial kid on the block. I haven't used it yet, but it provides debugging and profiling.
• You can hand code timing functions using a simple AOP framework like Ajaxpect. That's sort of the approach taken by qooxdoo, i.e. you can instrument the entire app in this way.
• JsLex - very sweet cross-browser profiler. You deploy it as a war in an appserver and expose it through the same url as your app. On the client side it works by parsing and instrumenting your Javascript code. You can do that either through the webapp's interface or through an ant task. Not quite as simple as Firebug, but still pretty sweet. See this Ajaxian story for some screenshots.

There are a few other things on the horizon, such as AjaxView, a server-side proxy that rewrites and instruments your JavaScript as it is served up. Still experimental. I realize that the above is a potentially bigger concept than a plain old profiler, but how about starting with the simpler ideas and working our way up?

Technorati Tags: ajax, tools, profiling, javascript

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