Whoever hosts the Web Inspector frontend page has the real connection to the 
backend. The host provides an InspectorFrontendHost global object to the 
frontend page that can be used to send messages through that already 
established connection. Likewise when the host wants to trigger operations in 
the frontend page it calls methods on InspectorFrontendAPI.

• The frontend page uses InspectorFrontendHost.sendMessageToBackend to send 
JSON Inspector Protocol messages to the backend. This is never used directly, 
we generate APIs that construct the JSON messages that get sent through this.

• The frontend page receives messages from the backend through 
InspectorFrontendAPI.prototype.dispatchMessageAsync. Again generated APIs route 
these incoming messages to more convenient places such as domain observers or 
callbacks for earlier commands.

On the native side you can look at WebInspectorProxy::sendMessageToBackend to 
see how the frontend host's native connection to the backend is used and 
related code to see how it was established. Ultimately only a 
Inspector::FrontendChannel needs to be provided to WebCore's 
InspectorController to establish a backend <-> frontend connection. So you can 
set a breakpoint on WebCore::InspectorController::connectFrontend and see how / 
where it gets triggered. The common case in WebKit2 happens under 
WebKit::WebInspector::show.

- Joe

> On Feb 24, 2017, at 5:33 AM, kwadwo amankwa <citis...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Just studying the Inspector code and interested to know how(or where) the 
> Inspector front-end connects to the backend.
> 
> cheers
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> webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org
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