[webkit-dev] WebKit blog post proposal: Remote debugging with Web Inspector.

[Pavel Feldman]

Hi guys,

I started drafting the blog post "Remote Debugging with Web Inspector":
http://www.webkit.org/blog/?p=1620&preview=true.

I'd like to cover following topics there:

    - ability to use Web Inspector front-end with remote / embedded devices
    - ability to implement alternate front-ends for IDEs
    - share the update on the protocol work progress

Calling for the early feedback.

Thanks
Pavel

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 11:48 PM, Pavel Feldman <pfeldman at chromium.org>wrote:

> Hi guys,
>
> As some of you know, we are working on a remote debugging feature in Web
> Inspector. There are many good reasons behind the project including the
> following:
>
> - Debugging WebKit on embedded devices
> - Shaping up a good protocol for ourselves
> - Introducing external SDKs on top of the protocol for IDE integrations and
> alternate front-ends
>
> We've had serialized interaction with the out-of-process inspector for
> quite a while in Chromium. We were upstreaming it into WebKit and have
> reached an important milestone recently: all the interaction between the
> inspected page and inspector is entirely serialized on the WebKit level. All
> the embedder needs to do is to implement a socket that would serve the
> inspector front-end files and provide our messaging with appropriate
> transport.
>
> Now this socket is likely to be platform-specific, implemented on the
> WebKit and/or host browser levels. It also makes more sense to implement
> socket on mobile platforms first. However, we've done a proof-of-concept
> implementation in Chromium and it is now in a demoable state! See the
> screencast at http://screencast.com/t/YTI2OTY4YTEt. It has Chromium
> nightly to the left + WebKit nightly to the right. WebKit nightly connects
> remotely to Chromium over HTTP on the port 9222 and does remote debugging
> including DOM inspection, breakpoints and such. The communication is
> established by means of a WebSocket. The interesting thing about the
> implementation is that inspector front-end is fetched from the host browser,
> so that there is no mess with protocol versioning and no need in exposing
> the interaction protocol any time soon.
>
> So I made the demo and it looked cool. I thought maybe we do a blog post on
> it. The blog post would draw attention to the Web Inspector and its
> progress, share the remote debugging vision with the interested parties and
> would simply look cool. Front-end is working as a pure HTML5 application
> (obviously full of WebKit-specific styles, but still) which is impressive.
> Now the project is nowhere complete in terms of finalizing the message
> format and the protocol itself, but there is no intention to expose it right
> now. We'd like to let it live with fetchable front-end and mature before we
> expose the protocol and commit to any level of interface support.
>
> What do you think, is it ready for a blog post?
>
> Thanks
> Pavel
>
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