Professional iPhone™ and iPod® touch Programming: Building Applications for Mobile Safari™

Chapter 12. Testing and Debugging

Get in, get out. That's the attitude that most developers have in testing and debugging their applications. Few developers look forward to these tasks during the development cycle, and so they want to efficiently get into the code, figure out what's working and what's not, fix any problems, and then move on.

Given the heterogeneous nature of Web applications, debugging has always been challenging, particularly when trying to work with client-side JavaScript. To address this need, fairly sophisticated debugging tools have emerged over the past few years among the developer community, most notably Firebug and other add-ons to Firefox. However, the problem is that most of these testing tools that Web developers have come to rely on for desktop browsers are not yet compatible with the iPhone and iPod touch platform.

Many iPhone developers, unsure of where else to turn, end up resorting to alert() debugging — you know, adding alert() throughout the body of the script code to determine programmatic flow and variable values. However, not only is this type of debugging painful, but it can also throw off the timing of your script, making it difficult or impossible to simulate real world results. While the number of debugging and testing tools are indeed limited right now for Mobile Safari, you still have options that either work directly inside Mobile Safari or emulate Mobile Safari on your desktop. You will probably want to incorporate aspects of both as ...