sure you're right – I've been through the tutorials and even built my first mini-application: The immediate pain of not knowing where what goes wrong fades a little after the first steps.

Still, the fact that the browser reports the error in the compiled version, you still have to guess where the error comes from. Even harder for beginners. A littlle bit like early jsp…

I found the debugging-tutorial and after installing the cappuccino-tools and watching some of the screencasts at http://cappuccinocasts.com/ developing with cappuccino starts to feel ok…

However, testing seems to be a little underdeveloped: This is the only thing I could find: http://www.nice-panorama.com/Programmation/capp… – which is helpful, but a little sparse on the strategies of testing in cappuccino: Are there any more tutorials on testing somewhere? There are some tests in objj/narwhal/test, but I didn't find too many examples for actual cappuccino-application-tests… Any pointers to example would be great!

There's a tutorial on debugging and another on Objective-J on the
tutorials section of our website. (http://cappuccino.org/learn/
tutorials).

There is an OJUnit framework which is included in the tools
installation of Cappuccino. It runs on top of rhino, and right now is
mostly suitable for non visual testing.

The easiest way to find the source of an error is to load it in Safari
4 or a webkit nightly and turn on debugging, and the “Break on
Exception” option. This will give you a stack trace to the problem.

Being very new to cappucino, there are two things I might just have been missing: But they are obviously not prominent enough in the documentation:

- what about testing? How to test a cappucino app? Is there some sort of ObjectJUnit I have missed?
- how about debugging? Not the complex things like stepping through, inspecting variables and so on. Just the simple things, like seeing which file produced the error in what line? Every once in a while I got simple problems like a class not being found. This can be easily fixed, because you know which class imports what. The Browser-Error is not of much help: [Exception... "'*** Could not locate file named "AppKit/CALaxer.j" in search paths.' when calling method: [nsIDOMEventListener::handleEvent]” nsresult: “0x8057001c (NS_ERROR_XPC_JS_THREW_JS_OBJECT)” location: “<unknown>” data: no]. All exceptions are thrown by Objective-J.js – so you can only guess where the error comes from. Other errors are just swallowed silently (This maybe points back to messages being swallowed that go to nil-objects – but how do I find the error now?)

To sum it up: I'm seriously impressed about the look&feel and the things you can build with it – but I'm missing some basics here: Sure, it will take a while to get into it, but is there a tutorial on how to get these basics (testing, finding&fixing errors) to work?

http://www.cer24.com/