Code Window

This is where the code is displayed. See the "Debugging" tab for info about the debugging options

Navigation Window

The navigation window contains a tree with JavaScript examples. It also contains a "My code" entry, here you can access your own code. Once you start editing a program, your edited code will be saved here. You can only work on one program at the same time. Please note that when you close the TIDE web site, this code will be lost!

Output Window

If you use document.write(), then the result will be displayed in the output window. Alternatively, you can use the the function message() to write to the window. The output may contain HTML tags.

Watch Window

The watch window allows monitoring variables and expressions during debugging. Initially, the list is imported from the source code, as defined in the comment: // watch:x,y,z. You can add, delete and modify watchlist entries.

Call stack Window

Shows which function have been called, from what line, and the values of the parameters

Ad Window

Can be very informative...

Introduction

TIDE is a Tiny IDE for JavaScript. Its purpose is to write, analyze or debug small JavaScript programs. The current version 2.0 is still beta and has some bugs, but it is already better than the previous version. Please note that it might not run all JavaScript programs correctly, but the provided examples should all work.

For debugging complete web pages I highly recommend Firebug, which is a Firefox extension. TIDE does not depend on debug features of the browser and therefore works with many browsers like Firefox, IE, Opera, and Safari.

Breakpoints

You can set breakpoints by clicking on the line number. The line number then changes as can be seen in the figure.

Note that breakpoints on empty lines or lines where nothing is executed should be avoided since TIDE will not stop there.

Bugs/Issues

• Some layout problems
• Highlighting issues
• Browser incompatibilities
• break and continue need an ";"
• Watch list may not contain function calls with variables as parameters
• Syntax error reporting does not really work
• Tooltip on variables during debugging does not work
• Probably a lot more...