By nature, AJAX based web applications are not bookmarkable nor do they recover well from user initiated back and forward button clicks.Really Simple History (RSH) framework makes it easy for AJAX applications to incorporate bookmarking and back and button support.

Although Joe Hewitt’s Firebug has become my favorite JavaScript debugging tool, I still find SlayerOffice’s Javascript Object Tree Favelet a handy tool. Simply click the favelet to show a list of all the javascript object currently referenced on the page.

I have created a 15 minute screencast that will show you how to Debug JavaScript with Firebug. I cover a number of concepts such as using the console, interactive debugger and timer features of the Firebug extension for Firefox. If you haven’t tried Firebug yet, I’m sure that this screencast will convince you to make it a part of your JavaScript coding workflow.

I hope you enjoy my first screencast! I plan on doing a few more over the next couple of weeks, so I would appreciate your feedback.

Launch the screencast now! (requires Flash)

If you’re writing AJAX code and/or standards-based web pages you should be using Joe Hewitt’s Firebug extension for Firefox. Version 0.4 has just been released and is the most significant upgrade to date. I have been beta testing this version for a couple of weeks now, and I can’t image developing without it. One of the greatest new features is a JavaScript Debugger that allows you to simply add breakpoints to your JS code, then step through your code line by line, and inspect local variables and the call stack. There are tonnes of other great features, so head over to Joe’s site and give Firebug a try!

Simon Willison shares his thoughts on the The Yahoo! User Interface Library during this year’s XTech. Reading his notes will hopefully help you see the real power behind Yahoo’s new open source JavaScript library.

Pawel Knapik has a new custom function for easier DOM manipulation. Functions like this one, can certainly ease the pain of DOM scripting!

[Link via SXSW pal Dustin Diaz]

Alex Bosworth offers his list of10 Places You Must Use Ajax and a few more places where you shouldn’t use this fancy JavaScript trick.

DOM Builder is a great little script that will spare you the typing of createElements, setAttributes and appendChilds over and over again! This script which weighs in at 1K allows you to create DOM nodes with the elegance displayed in this following snippet:

var html = DomBuilder.apply();

var form = html.FORM(
  html.DIV(
    html.INPUT({type : 'text', name : 'email'}),
    html.INPUT({type : 'text', name : 'password'}),
    html.INPUT({type : 'submit'}),
  )
);

Pretty slick!

The Particletree blog has a tutorial titled Lightbox Gone Wild that shows how to use the Lightbox JavaScript library to create modal dialog boxes.

This is old news, but worth linking to and reading again. The DOM Scripting Task Force has published a DOM Scripting Manifesto that covers some important ideas and concepts around the scripting the DOM. Their blog is also excellent with lots of links to current trends in DOM Scripting.