Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008
Dojo Firebug Lite: Beyond console.log
Mike Wilcox has posted on Firebug Lite for Dojo and shows how he has taken it beyond console.log().
I was most excited about the DOM inspector:
Yes, I did say that a DOM inspector would imitate existing tools. However, I implemented this for a colleague who was struggling with a particularly nasty IE 6.0 bug one day (more like one month), as he expressed a wish to view the dynamic DOM to verify hover states in IE6 — the one browser without this tool. Because Firebug Lite already had some nice formatting built in with the dirxml() method, it was just a matter of grabbing the current event target from the onmousemove event, and displaying the result in its own section. The current target is outlined, and clicking on it makes it “stickâ€.
As much as everyone loves Firefox, the Dojo team is committed to the Open Web, which means encouraging competition amongst browsers. One way of fostering that competition is through debugging tools, such as Firebug Lite. We are trying to make it as easy as possible to code for large user-base browsers like Internet Explorer, or preferred browsers, like Safari or Opera, or… [your favorite browser here].
Very nice work, I might implement some dojo during development just to test browser bugs (talk about a way to get developers to use your framework).
On the IE 6 note, has anyone else had several issues in IE6 (multiple IEs) since upgrading to IE8 beta, particularly not being able to put anything into input fields?
Do I need to know anything about Dojo to use this?
@nosredna - No, not at all. If you are simply interested in using FirebugLite, including dojo.js (even the one hosted by AOL or Goodle) with isDebug:true enabled will also load in the required firebuglite code automatically (in non-firefox browsers). Specifying popup:true creates FirebugLite as a popup window.
Phantasic, phiggins! Thanks.
Hmm. Is it “djConfig.isDebug” that I set, as the linkd article says? Or “isDebug”? All I can find when I load the dojo library is “dojo.config.isDebug”.
What _exactly_ do I do to get this working? I set dojo.config.isDebug to true on page load and nothing seems to happen.
Looking great! I think between CompanionJS, Drosera (when it finally works on Windows), and Firebug we have enough tools for proper cross-platform debugging and testing.
I found a tutorial that answered my questions…
http://www.dojotoolkit.org/book/book-dojo/part-4-meta-dojo-making-your-dojo-code-run-faster-and-better/debugging-facilities/deb
I just released this the other day too. Its a light-firebug tool also: http://www.nitobibug.com/
free etc.
alexeiwhite,
Hey, you should email the Ajaxian guys and try to get that featured. Looks like you put lot of work into it and I’m not sure people are still reading the comments to this post.