This is my understanding coding for SharePoint Online as it stands today:
Apps are the newest thing, and most encouraged. Visual Studio can be used to create apps for SharePoint Online, without any SharePoint on premises version installed. How do we debug it? Visual Studio won't let us point to a live site.
For any other SharePoint Online projects (such as workflows), an on premises version of SharePoint must be installed before Visual Studio will install the necessary extensions. This is really annoying and not very well thought through from a company that is pushing O365 and SharePoint Online. Overlooking that, we still can't debug our code. Debugging to SharePoint Foundation is useless given the vast differences between SharePoint Online and SharePoint on premises, and we can't point to a SharePoint Online site.
My method of debugging at the moment is creating the project, uploading, and hoping it works. This obviously isn't a sustainable method, and oh by the way, if there is a correlation error there seems to be no way to view the logs...
No serious developer can work this way. What am I missing, or what is the thinking at Microsoft here?
Edited to add: One thing I made was a custom team site template, not JavaScript, obviously. Also, workflows won't be JavaScript?