Recommend a development environment for HTML5/Javascript? [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
IDE for JavaScript development

I want to teach myself HTML5 and Javascript (or if not Javascript, whatever the preferred technology is for manipulating HTML 5 and the DOM these days). Can anyone recommend a good development environment for this (on a Windows 7 PC)? I can make a start with notepad and Google chrome, but I was kind-of hoping a developer friendly IDE exists for this kind of thing.

Also, as a follow up question, is Javascript THE way to manipulated the DOM, or is there some other technology out there I don't know about that's superior and supported across the board?

Thanks.

Edit: Ok, I would like to expand the scenario somewhat, because I didn't really put the question into context. I'm interested in designing and writing GUI components with HTML5/Canvass. I already do this for a living with native development and wanted to extend my skills onto the web, so I've still got that base covered from a skills point of view. So my goal here is to provide some "drag and drop" (not an appropriate metaphor for web development I'm sure) components that others can use. I'm assuing HTML5/Javascript is the way to go, but I'm used to a good debugger, so was kind-of hoping to have that ability too. I'm not sure if browsers support this in any reasonable sense - but an embedded browser in a specialised IDE might.

Answer 1

Check out Aptana (http://www.aptana.com/). It's free and has almost everything you will ever need as well as an awesome debugger.

Also, grab yourself a copy of FireFox with FireBug extension. It's amazing for real time debugging in the browser and allows you to make changes to live code to see how it might look/work if you actually coded it that way.

Hope this helps!

Jeffrey Kevin Pry

Answer 2

It's a tricky question to answer as it's very much down to personal preference.

It sounds as though you are starting out, so to guess a couple of requirements I'm guessing you'll probably want it to be free (or cheap), easy to use, easy to install?

If so I'd reccomend checking out either Mirosoft WebMatrix or Visual Studio Web Developer Express.

Both are free, WebMatrix is geard towards early learning. So I'd suggest starting with WebMatrix.

Visual Studio Web Developer Express is more complex, but I'd recommend using this if you're planning to become a professional web developer as it's very similar to Visual Studio Professional.

Web Developer Express has intellisense (auto complete) for html and javascript and since sp1 (I think automatically installed) also includes support for HTML5. I believe WebMatrix does as well, but probably not as sophisticated intellisense.

I'd especially recommend these tools if you are later planing to learn ASP.net.

Both can be very easily installed using the web platform installer via this site: http://www.microsoft.com/web/platform/tools.aspx

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EDIT: My mistake, I thought Robinson was a beginer to development (I was very wrong!) :-) Instead just getting back into the web side of things.

If you're looking for a full blown IDE; debugger / web server / intellisense / live(ish) preview of changes etc etc and perhaps in the future thinking of ASP.net: I'd reccomend Visual Studio Web Developer Express.