Javascript Syntax Validation

I am real fan of AJAX (not the cleaning product - I think my wife is a fan of that!). The really annoying thing about producing an AJAX front end for a web application is the lack of good free tools for Javascript. I recently stumbled upon the Web tool project (WTP) of the Eclipse foundation, who's goal is to produce a plugin for Eclipse (the greatest editor) to handle all AJAX languages like HTML, Javascript, CSS etc. Although the WTP plugin adds syntax highlighting functionality for Javascript, it does not perform any of the useful features that Eclipse has been synonymous for Java like Syntax checking, highlighting variable occurrences etc.

I searched on the web for a syntax checker for Javascript. I know that Firefox has a plugin which outlines syntax errors while running the script. However, I wanted to eradicate syntax errors before running a script, because there are other errors to worry about when running a script.

I came across Javascript Lint, which has a really neat utility for checking for Javascript syntax errors. It also provide a downloadable little app that can check the syntax of scripts as a command line utility or even as a right click option in the windows file explorer.

Javascript Lint uses Firefoxe's Javascript engine to check for syntax errors. I came across this article which seems to say that the Firefox JS engine was very strict. However, my experiences with it have been ok so far.

Using awk to calculate the total times by parsing a log file

I came across a problem that I imaged would be very common to anyone trying to run an experiment with a software product: 'Analysing a log file and calculating a the total time a user has been performing a certain task'. A number of solutions exist, one of which is to export the whole log to a spreadsheet app like Excel and calculate the differences of time using a simple formula. However, using spreadsheets can be very tedious. The Linux shell command, Awk allows the creation of small scripts that completely automates the whole process. For windows users like me, cygwin is freely available (www.cygwin.com).

Here's the script that I used;

BEGIN {total = 0}
/.*system_login/ { sprintf("date +%%s -d '%s %s'", $1, $2) | 
                               getline tmstamp1;}
/.*system_logout/ { sprintf("date +%%s -d '%s %s'", $1, $2) | 
                               getline tmstamp2;
          print (user " " $1 " " tmstamp2 - tmstamp1);
          total += tmstamp2 - tmstamp1;
}
END{print (user " total " total);}

The awk language is a bit cryptic but nothing to be afraid of. The main idea of awk is it searches for a patter and performs a command on the found line. Each command is formatted /search pattern/action/. More information available at http://www.vectorsite.net/tsawk.html. So the second line of the script decodes, search for occurrences of "system_login" (with any thing in front) and perform the date extraction command that follows.

An awk script has a begin part, a body part and an end part. The being part is executed prior to anything else, so initialisation goes there and ending is just before the script quits. The body is where the actual logic is performed.

I've used the shell "date" command to convert a date to a value in seconds. However, you can't simply go result = system("date ...") (system can be used to execute a shell command within awk). It only returns result of command 1 or 0. So the command has to executed using sprintf and piped to getline.

Since I had a log file under the name log.dat in a directory created that corresponds their login name, I had to loop through all the directories using a for loop;

for i in *; do awk -f process-times.awk user=$i $i/log.dat ; done