I’ve programmed in a lot of different languages, and with various IDE’s. The one area that has always been lacking is a simple means to review JavaScript code for common errors, both syntactical and format. This is where JSLint and JavaScript Lint come in…. these represent the tooling previously available to other languages like C++ and Java, where you can analyze code without actually executing it to identify problem areas. Often, these are items like ‘missing semicolons’ that occasionally cause difficult to find errors in browsers.
These can be scripted to execute from the command line or within (some) IDE’s on several operating systems.