Best Javascript platform?

[Miksu]

I have always avoided Javascript like a plague but now it seems that I need to learn at least the basics of it. Which JS-platforms / libraries you would recommend?

I prefer languages and platform which are productive which is why I've been using mainly .NET for the past few years. So if I can continue using Visual Studio, that's a big plus. ASP.NET's Ajax seems to include somekind of a JS-library but is it any good? Also jQuery seems to be rather popular.

 

[Gubbi]

Firefox with Firebug is probably the best environment to test and debug javascript. Any editor with syntax support will do. Don't know if there are IDEs where you can debug javascript, stop, edit and continue.

Cheers

 

[suryad]

Yes there are lots of IDEs that support Javascript. Intellij, Netbeans, and Eclipse has plugins I am sure. But that is not going to help considering they are all Java based. GWT is great. Then theres DWR, Dojo, etc but this link could help maybe? http://javascriptlibraries.com/ and this is an old link but still helpful http://edevil.wordpress.com/2005/11/14/javascript-libraries-roundup/

 

[Spaceman-Spiff]

I second Firefox with Firebug. If you want to use other browsers, use Firebug Lite: http://getfirebug.com/lite.html

 

[Tokelil]

One more vote for FF with firebug. It is pretty well done and making it easy to set breakpoints etc. in javascripts.

About libraries, http://mootools.net/ should be good I have been told, but I haven't had time to try it out my self. (It is used in many big projects though according to their homepage)

If you just want to do some basic AJAX stuff, then the AJAX.net library is pretty easy to setup and use. You get good form support etc. in Visual studio 2008 SP1. I don't know how much you can use it you self, but I think it has quite many helper functions etc.

 

[MuFu]

Another vote for FF + Firebug:

ExtJS is a great library for getting an app together fast: http://extjs.com/

 

[Miksu]

Thanks for the answers.

I've been going through different options and I think I'm going to start with the ASP.NET Ajax + ExtJS compination. There's an ASP.NET "port" of the ExtJS available which seems to be working quite ok and makes things even simpler.

Also if there's others out there who are interested in creating a Web 2.0 portal (think Google IG) with ASP.NET, I can recommend Dropthings. It's an open source project and you can download the codes from Codeplex. Also the creator of the project has written many good tutorials to Codeproject and there's even a book available (which I ordered).

 

[Frank]

I recently came along haXe. I'm planning on using that. The great thing about it: you don't have to actually program in that awful JavaScript.