Aptana JavaScript Outline View

Aptana Studio is a great IDE for developing Web Applications. The fact that it is built on Eclipse and completely free leaves little to be desired. That being said, there is one feature I have always found to be lacking, which is, the Outline View for JavaScript. Or, more precisely, the fact that it dosent provide an Outline View when your code is sandboxed within an immediate function.

As it turns out, it actually does; only there is a syntactical caveat to it – your immediate functions must have the closing parentheses defined outside of the function.

For example, while my preferred tool for validating Javascript is JSHint, the much stricter JSLint requires defining an immediate function’s invocation (i.e. the closing parentheses) within the function:

In JSLint, failing to do so, such as the following:

… results in the following error:

Error: Move the invocation into the parens that contain the function.

Being somewhat used to conforming to these (arguably unnecessary) rules, after some trial and error I found that adhering to JSLint’s requirements was in fact the cause of Aptana failing to provide an Outline View.

The solution to this problem is quite simple, just keep the invocation outside of the immediate function and Aptana will display the correct Outline View. Technically, I would consider this a bug on Aptana’s part and therefore have filed APSTUD-4364. Hopefully this issue will be resolved. In the interim, I hope this post helps.

Update: As of , this has been fixed by the Aptana team. Details

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  1. I find the (function(){}()); syntax barely unreadable, I finally choose to use: new function{ } … it takes a little more time to execute (67ms vs 15ms on a 100000 loop) but is way more readable. It probably can help there too.

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