On Aug 9, 2010, at 3:48 PM, ext Pavel Feldman 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?

I think it is ready for a blog post. Nice work!

I've been leveraging your work to make remote Web Inspector work in QtWebKit. 
I've also been working on exposing a ChromeDevTools / V8 debugger protocol 
backend so that we can use an Eclipse IDE for W3C Widget and Qt WRT debugging. 
The IDE debugger backend is structured as an alternate front-end for Web 
Inspector. I submitted several patches to enable that, and I think our debugger 
backend is getting to a state where I'm willing to post that code as well.

Best regards,
Jamey Hicks




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