On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 1:24 PM, Brian Slesinsky <[email protected]>wrote:
> We talked about it a bit back when we started on Super Dev Mode. The > main drawback is that if we take over the remote debugging protocol > for a different purpose, what happens when you want to use a debugger? > Also, there's no web standard as far as I know; each browser has its > own protocol that they probably feel free to change. > > So it seems like you'd need a complete debugger that works with many > browsers. That's more than I'm willing to take on, but it seems like > a good opportunity for IDE vendors who are doing that anyway. > > I've heard that for Chrome, the debugger UI is written in JavaScript > and it seems pretty reasonable to fork it and add some GWT-specific > features. (And merge changes upstream where it makes sense, so there > are stable extension points.) I expect Firefox is fairly similar. This > might be a good way to get started without making a big project out of > it. > When we first started building DevMode, we looked at using the browser debugger (I hesitate to call it an API) to implement the functionality. However, on FF there was no way to get finalizer callbacks to free up the wrappers for JSOs held on the Java side, and there were some other limitations I don't remember at this point. Getting finalizer callbacks is something I wouldn't normally expect to be exposed to a debugger, so I would be surprised if that were no longer a problem. Other than that, I would expect that the debugger wire protocol is even less stable than the unfrozen APIs we use for DevMode plugins, so it isn't clear it buys you much over building the plugins (other than reducing the number of platforms you have to support for each browser). Another approach would be to make the browser look like a remote JVM for debugging, if the primary thing you want is to get is using your IDEs debugger. At first glance, that seems impractical to emulate what is a pretty low-level protocol on top of entirely different VMs, but maybe it is feasible. -- John A. Tamplin -- http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors
