Ask HN: JavaScript Dev Tools

I'm an experienced developer who is really interested in JavaScript frameworks such as Node.js, Backbone, and client side stuff such as Sencha. However, I'm struggling with them, which I think is because I haven't found the right tooling or a setup that suits my workflow. On my Java, Rails and C++ projects, I'm equally as happy in emacs as I am in a richer IDE, but this combination of loosely typed JavaScript and poorly documented framework APIs based around massively nested maps means I can barely get a page of moderately complexity to even parse. When I get past that, my debugger consists of alert(). What am I missing in order to be able to effectively work with JavaScript? Would you recommend any particular APIs, Frameworks, Articles etc to get started?