Developer Mentality

[Justin Hickman]

When it comes to server side code, most developers "get it," meaning that they understand class responsibilities and are able to organize code in a maintainable way.

One problem that I have noticed, however, is that when it comes to web development (specifically with HTML and Javascript), developers tend to be lazy and don't view HTML and Javascript the same way as other code, thus creating extremely large HTML pages with Javascript scattered throughout without the proper separation.

With the introduction of Dojo and the Ajax idea in our website, it increases the amount of Javascript on the site. How do I, within my team, promote well organized HTML and Javascript in such a way that is easy to read and maintain?

[Frank Zammetti]

I've faced that exact problem with the teams I mentor at work as well. In fact, it was worse for me in some ways because many of the developers I had to mentor were coming from a mainframe programming background where there (typically) isn't even OOP concepts!

Unfortunately, I don't have any answer, other than continually hammering the point home. We do a lot of code reviews, and we have stringent static code analysis reports run daily, and we've even discussed tieing compliance on some things to reviews, although we haven't gone down that road yet.

If you figure it out, let me know

[Justin Hickman]

What kind of static analysis can you do with Javascript, or are you referring to static analysis on the Java side? Are there tools such as Checkstyle, findbugs, etc for Javascript?