Firefox/Projects/Console

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Interactive Console, 'HeadsUpDisplay'

Create an interactive Console to help web developers understand everything that happens during the creation of a web-page. Console entries will be time-stamped objects representing errors, network traffic, javascript events, DOM/HTML mutation and logging output. The Console will also have an interactive command line for evaluating javascript against the current webpage and an interactive Workspace window for entering and evaluating larger blocks of code.

For web-developers, the Console should include a logging API and a richer interactive environment for executing live javascript against the active webpage.

The Console should fully-replace the existing Error Console window.

Goals/Use Cases

• Replace Error Console
• Provide rich logging experience for web developers
• Provide interactive JS editing environment
• Provide simple object inspection (either via console or separate UI)

Non Goals

• chrome manipulation
• provide enough information to actually recreate the webpage from the logs
  • e.g., displaying images in expanded boxes
• overly pretty display. it's text!

Status

Logging is working, for now I have abandoned the approach of logging to a browser element in favor of a vbox element. Currently working on events and listeners to keep the logging console attached to new windows as they are spawned. Every reload completely replaces the contentWindow object. Luckily, sicking has landed a patch for this exact type of operation on bug 549539 - looking to use this method this week. Received feedback from mfinkle about the firefox-dependencies I have been using in the front end. Need to figure out how best to remove them (in the long or short run). Also filed these bugs: bug 551056 bug 552140 bug 552143 bug 552144

Timeline / Milestones

milestone 0.1

• create proper, threadsafe hud-service
  • possibly modify/reuse existing console service to serve our purposes
• add global console object / API
  • bug 534398

milestone 0.2

• console panel
• eval JS from command-line
• shorten timestamps in log output

milestone 0.3

• create popup menu for console content area
  • edit (copy / paste), save (import(?), apply(?) for later)
• JS command line history

milestone 0.4

• JS workspaces (tentative name)
  • create popup menu for workspaces, eg file, edit, evaluate
• console command line aliases and magic

milestone 0.5

• add links to view source in console
• Create event for Reflow
  • bug 453650

milestone 0.6

• more events!

milestone 0.7

• ...

Delivery Requirements

• Talked to jst about using an observer to instantiate our console object inside of the nsIDOMWindow's constructor to really make our implementation not have to deal with wrappers (or the details of) so much. This may be a mute point thanks to sicking's patch on bug 549539

Constraints

• Wrappers, but I think this will be a mute point, as mrbkap is close to landing a patch to make contentWindow property attachment "easy" and "fun"
• Security reviews early and often?

Testing

• now that the testing scaffolding is up, I plan on testing every method written, and am trying to write all of this code with testing on the "front burner"
• TDD!

Related Projects

Inspector [Inspector Page]

Related Bugs

Tracking bug 529086

bug 545266 bug 546708 bug 551056 bug 552140 bug 552143 bug 552144

Team

• Project Lead: robc
• Participants: ddahl

Designs

initial Console mockup, courtesy Johnathan Nightingale