Opera Dragonfly (alpha) Released

Over a year ago, I wrote about the Opera Developer Console. This morning (for me, at any rate), Opera posted Dragonfly, which (two years in the making) offers a completely fresh look at browser-based debugging.

It offers most of the familiar tools for DOM inspection (along with a nice DOM editing capability), error logging (with the same granularity as before wrapped in a more polished UI), a JavaScript debugger that rivals WebKit's Drosera, a JavaScript thread logger, and a lot more that I haven't explored yet.

Time will tell whether Dragonfly can get enough developers to use Opera and keep them there, and how much the developers behind the new developer tools listen to the community in the coming iterations, but so far this looks extremely promising.

Edit: Chris Mills from Opera gave me some additional info:

Part of the reason I haven't found the XMLHttpRequest logger/debugger apparently stems from it not getting exposed yet, though it will appear in an upcoming iteration, along with HTTP header inspection (not just for XMLHttpRequests, of course) and a new "single window mode" which sounds like it will make things much more usable! When using Safari's inspector, I almost always find myself attaching it to the window, and I always had the urge to do the same with Opera's developer console.

Chris also mentioned something which makes me very happy to hear: even though the Developer Tools (loaded via the Tools → Advanced → Developer Tools) download from Opera's server, it only does so the first time, and for each following update of the tools. This ensures that it not only saves Opera's servers when usage takes off, but it also ensures that developers can work offline, and the slow loading of the tools will only happen initially, loading from the local drive after installation.

Written in XML/CSS/JavaScript, Dragonfly will run in all browsers including Opera's Core-2.1 rendering engine (except Opera Mini for some reason), and even supports debugging on mobile devices by way of a proxy setup between the device and the desktop Dragonfly installation! This will prove invaluable for developers of web applications supporting devices, as they will have the ability to use their normal desktop tools to debug on the mobile browser without having to use emulation.

You can find more information in an Introduction to Opera Dragonfly and on the Opera Dragonfly product page (which has a very good start of fleshed-out documentation already, feedback and bugtracking, and of course a blog).

Edited to fix the Introduction to Opera Dragonfly link...

Announcing Universe Conflict!

Posted to the new project space on SourceForge.net:

An implementation of Space War!, one of the first digital computer games, created in 1961 on the PDP-1 computer, as recreated using the <canvas> HTML5 element and Ajax. It uses the Frozen Toolkit for the client-server communication and currently renders all images and animation using canvas and JavaScript objects.

I had always intended to release this as an open source project, but then realized that I didn't really have the full time to dedicate to it. It also currently exists more as sample code and an interactive demo than anything else, and I figured I should just post it for all to see and hopefully for some to contribute. I initially posted the introduction to it on my blog.

The client-side of this game currently works in Firefox and Opera, though gravity and shooting do not yet exist. The server-side of this currently works insofar as the absolute minimum required to send messages from one browser to the other in order for the two players to fly around each other.

At any rate, check out the code (svn co https://@webspacewar.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/webspacewar), play around with it, and feel free to submit patches! :-) I would love to see this completed and fully playable. "Space War!" doesn't have a lot of (base) rules, so it shouldn't take much to get there.

Edit: I've also finally, finally checked in the source code for a link checker I started...oh, I think back in 2002... I created the Cocoa/WebKit branch in order to do two things:

1. Learn Objective-C and Cocoa
2. Use the Cocoa/WebKit API in order to take care of the HTTP handling