Collaboration with Sandip's DevToolsApp

[paulirish]

@sandipchitale has written a really nice chrome app that has a very similar approach, but it's targeted at allowing you to define which devtools frontend you use. This also means people can write patches for DevTools frontend and you can easily try them out without them being upstreamed into Blink.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dev-tools-app/eichfopopofffkbhjgbabdegakcdmpkm?hl=en-US
https://github.com/sandipchitale/DevToolsApp

I don't know if these two projects can merge, as they have slightly different usecases, but the "choose your own frontend" feature is very compelling to me.

[auchenberg]

Totally. We could easily add the option to "use hosted DevTools" as power feature that would load the DevTools hosted/custom-front-end

I do wanna keep the local DevTools instance around, as we need to inject our own custom frontendHost in order to get Workspaces and other features working.

@sandipchitale Would you mind if I grab the logic from your Devtools app?

[sandipchitale]

@auchenberg

What is the exact use case you are solving? How is it different functionally from my Dev Tools App?

I understand that your implementation is Node Webkit based which requires different impl of each platform. Is that right?

[auchenberg]

@sandipchitale Chrome DevTools App is an experiment of separating DevTools from Chrome. It's completely independent of Chrome due to NW.js, which doesnt require a different implementation for each platform.

I'm planing to add Android device discovery, just like chrome://inspect in the coming weeks, and we are experimenting with MDNS/Bonjour to discover remote devices on the network. Such features can't be implemented in an Chrome app due to the limited API available.

[sandipchitale]

@auchenberg

I see. Go ahead and grab the logic from Devtools app as you find fit. It is implemented as a very simple Chrome App (not extension) using AngularJS+Bootstrap loaded into a webview. As such it does not need/use the Chrome devtools apis. It is simply loading the devtools code from a URL which in turn does all the work of selecting the page to debug from the list of pages returned by Chrome devtools backend.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

[auchenberg]

Cool, thanks a bunch! I'll shout if I hit any roadblocks.

[jasonLaster]

Adding my 2cents. I think both projects are cool, but different.

[sandipchitale]

I have updated my implementation of DevtoolsApp mentioned above. This time it is called AnyDevtoolsApp. Now it is an electron-based app implemented in Angular. Check it out here:

• https://github.com/sandipchitale/AnyDevtoolsApp/releases
• https://github.com/sandipchitale/AnyDevtoolsApp/blob/master/README.md