In our review of the top ten books on jQuery, W3schools.com JavaScript and jQuery pages have been recommended as the place to go for testing out the code you find in the various book pages. However, there is another and perhaps better option for testing and demoing your JavaScript framework code – jsFiddle.
jsFiddle provides the same Edit and test environ that W3schools does – all the JavaScript and CSS links are predefined but then goes 2 or 4 steps further. First, jsFiddle supports about a dozen JavaScipt frameworks including the most popular like Dojo, EXTjs, Mootools, jQuery, Processing and YUI. All the frameworks have several versions available – for example, Mootools versions 1.1.2. thru 1.4.4 are available and so on for the other frameworks. This is no small matter for developers who have to test fit in code into different framework versions on various servers
Highlighted in yellow on the screenshot of jsFiddle above are 5 other nifty features for test and demo environ:
1)with the Add Resources accordion button developers can add additional framework script and link resources – very handy for complex and/or multi-framework apps;
2)the Info button allows changing the title, description, body tag and HTML DTD used for the test page;
3) in the toolbar on the top of the jsFiddle screen – the TidyUp button uses the Tidy program to format the contents in the CSS, HTML, and Java panels/windows;
4)in the toolbar again, the JSLint button runs the JavaScript checking routine giving precise error messages where the JavaScript has gone bad. This is better/more precise than the Google Chrome IDE and Firefox’s otherwise excellent Firebug console;
5) the Share button is why I call jsFiddle a demo environ. jsFiddle creates a)shortcode URL to get at the browser session; b)iframe code to embed the session on your blog/website; c)Facebook and Twitter embed codes. In sum this is a a great environ to also demo what you plan to do.
Summary
jsFiddle is a well composed JavaScript test and demo environ that deserves its testing mettle. Come here for testing out those code snippets from web tutorial sites or kindle code recipe books. This saves you the trouble of creating the equivalent code in Notepad or your favorite Web IDE. And then getting the message out to your development team.
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