weinre 1.4.0 available

weinre 1.4.0 is now available in the usual place: https://github.com/pmuellr/weinre/downloads. Changelog is available here: http://pmuellr.github.com/weinre/ChangeLog.html.

Major changes for this release:

• Google Groups mailing list
• extensions
• multi-user support

As always, for bugs or feature requests, create an an issue. Or use the new Google Group (see below).

Google Groups mailing list

I've created a Google Group for weinre, here: http://groups.google.com/group/weinre. Usual stuff applies, the group is set to moderate messages for "new" members.

extensions

Like all great platforms, Web Inspector has an extension mechanism allowing users to write code to extend the capabilities of the tool. The extension support for real Web Inspector (used in Safari/Chrome/etc) is not currently enabled, but I went ahead and enabled it in weinre.

I've written two extensions so far.

• https://github.com/pmuellr/weinre-ext-dom-monster - runs DOM Monster on your device, displaying the results in weinre
• https://github.com/pmuellr/weinre-ext-sample - an example extension you can use to base a new extension on.

Here's a screen-shot of DOM Monster running in weinre - click the image to see a larger version. Isn't that panel icon so cute!

The extension support is best-effort at present. Definitely open an issue for bugs or feature requests. If it's API related, I may forward them to the WebKit bugzilla component for Web Inspector.

I presume in real Web Inspector, all the various .html files that are loaded will be sandboxed, like Chrome and Safari extensions, but for weinre they're running as iframes of the main inspector window. As such, they have full access to everything in Web Inspector. Powerful. Dangerous. Have fun.

I decided to use a deployment structure that is easily mapped to a VCS, like Git/GitHub. This makes it easy to install and update extensions. To install the DOM Monster extension, run the following shell commands:

mkdir ~/.weinre
mkdir ~/.weinre/extensions
cd ~/.weinre/extensions    
git clone git@github.com:pmuellr/weinre-ext-dom-monster.git

To update the extension, after I make and publish changes, just run:

cd ~/.weinre/extensions/weinre-ext-dom-monster
git pull

multi-user support

This support will only be useful to folks who want to host a weinre server for multiple people to use simultaneously. For more information, see: http://pmuellr.github.com/weinre/MultiUser.html.

Although it's noted in the doc, I will mention here also. There is no real security here. Your client and target need to know a "shared secret" to connect to each other. On the bright side, there's never any information persisted on the weinre server, everything is transient, so if you aren't connected to a weinre server, there's nothing for anyone to steal.

There's likely more work to be done here, but looking for feedback.