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

We have console! Pushed the current patch to tryserver. the console object is re-attached to the contentWindow on each reload, starting on the console output (HeadsUpDisplay) now bug 534398

Started working on a "bridge" component that - based on the APP_ID - reattaches the console in firefox one way, thunderbird, fennec, seamonkey in their preferred way (not planning on implementing other application "hooks" myself)

Timeline / Milestones

milestone 0.1

• Testing, jsm and component scaffolding: bug 545266 bug 546708
• create proper, threadsafe hud-service
  • possibly modify/reuse existing console service to serve our purposes - check.
  • bug 534398

milestone 0.2

• console reattachment on reload, new window creation
• console panel (preliminary XUL widget)
• add global console object / API
• (submit for toolkit peer feedback/review) - check.

milestone 0.3

• ConsoleMessage class: abstract all console message types into a ConsoleMessage object
• HTTP traffic observation and logging
• DOM Mutation event logging
• eval JS from command-line
• "Terminal-like" UI for each "JS context" - "JS Workspaces"
• JS command line history
• GeckoApplication "Mixins": allow any Gecko application (beginning with Firefox) to insert UI and JS Context hooks

milestone 0.4 - CURRENT WORK 2010-04-05

• Preferences to toggle functionality
• Refactor HeadsUpDisplay.jsm to not be Firefox-specific
• Attach console input to console UI: the "JSTerm" object should be able to be used as either an input for the console or a stand-alone terminal (modularization)
  • create popup menu for console content area
    • edit (copy / paste), save (import(?), apply(?) for later)
• JS Workspaces polish
  • create popup menu for workspaces, eg file, edit, evaluate
• console command line aliases and magic: make extensibility API for Gecko apps, Jetpack
• break bigger files down to stand-alone "support" jsms for easier maintainability and review (with isolated tests)
• Firefox UI front-end planning/brainstorm/mockups

milestone 0.5

• Firefox UI front-end implementation
• add links to view source in console
• Create event for Reflow
  • bug 453650

milestone 0.6

• W3C Timing Spec??
• 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

Screenshots

Additional Thoughts

Chris Blizzard mentioned the "timing" interface Google is working on with the WC3: http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/WebTiming/