I am very pleased to announce version 2 of the AJAX APIs Playground. For
those of you not familiar with it, the Playground is an educational application designed to
show interactive code samples for some of Google's coolest Javascript APIs. Of the new
changes, the most obvious is the sweet new UI, thanks to help from Roman Nurik of the Google
Earth team.
The new features are:
* Break points
(simulated in Javascript)
* Firebug Lite in output for debugging
* Line numbers in code editor
* Ability to edit HTML of
samples
The breakpoints and Firebug Lite additions are my favorite new features. But why did I
include Firebug Lite when all web developers (should!) have Firebug installed? Because when
code runs on the Playground, it runs in an iFrame. That iFrame does not have the Firebug
object initialized in it. Since it is a cross-domain iFrame, there's no simple way to add
Firebug to the iFrame's window object, so adding Firebug Lite was the best approach. This
makes it so you can now use all of your favorite Firebug debugging convenience functions
in the Playground!
To use Firebug Lite and breakpoints, simply click on
the line number you want to add a breakpoint to and hit "Debug Code". This will insert Firebug
Lite into the output and pause the execution on the breakpoint line number until you to click
the play button to continue. Try adding a breakpoint to a line, clicking "Debug Code", then
opening Firebug Lite and typing in a variable name to inspect the contents/value of the
variable at that point in the code.
Also, it's really important that you share
your feedback so that I know what you'd like to see in the next version of the
Playground! Thanks, and enjoy the Playground!
