Lightning Demo: weinre - a Debugger for the Mobile Web

Today, web developers have a large number of diagnostic tools available to help debug their web applications, starting with browser-specific debuggers like FireFox’s FireBug and WebKit’s Web Inspector.

Well, desktop web developers anyway. Most mobile platforms provide little in the way of diagnostic tooling for their browsers, leaving mobile web developers in a bit of a lurch.

weinre (WEb INspector REmote) is an open source tool to help bridge the web debugging tool gap in mobile. It repurposes the Web Inspector user interface to allow you to interact with a live mobile web application, from the luxury of a desktop browser window.

While not all of Web Inspector’s function is available in weinre, plenty of goodies are: the Elements panel to inspect and interact with the DOM, a Console to run arbitrary JavaScript code, inspection of LocalStorage and Web SQL storage, and timing and request/response data from XHRs.

Come see a live demo of weinre at this session!