Can anyone recommend a good editor for coding Javascript?? ie. once
which has 'intellisense' type prompting etc.
That simply isn't possible with Javascript. Well, it is to a point but the
biggest use of IntelliSense - member suggestion and completion - certainly
isn't possible.
In strictly-typed languages, you always know what a certain identifier
represents as you declare its type. If that type is a certain class, you
can look for the class definition and identify the various members it
exposes. In Javascript, this isn't possible as you never declare a
variable's type. A variable containing a string at one point in the
program could be a number at the next. The types can only be determined at
run-time and, due to the wide variety of feature support among browsers,
within the target environment.
About the best you can hope for is some of the more common features:
syntax highlighting, bracket-match highlighting, and possibly some
scope-based variable auto-completion (but I don't think there are any
editors that do that). Another feature that would be good, but absent in
probably every editor, is a syntax verifier.
If there isn't an editor with this built-in, is there a program which
does it as a quick-ref help tool??
What are you actually describing here? Really, the things that you use
often will be easily remembered. Just keep specifications and references
around for the less common things.
As for actual editors, a number are mentioned in the archives (see
<URL:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=group:comp.lang.javascript+editor>).
In addition to those, I'll also add Zend Studio (<
http://www.zend.com/>).
It's primarily a PHP editor but also provides syntax highlighting and
bracket-match highlighting for Javascript. The full license is expensive,
but there is a free license (when the evaluation expires) for personal use
which removes some of the features (like built-in FTP).
Mike
