Using Developer Tools to debug non-browser based apps

[mikeli...@gmail.com]

Hi,

I've been hacking on some cool stuff using Chrome Developer tools for a while at Square now.  What we did was use chrome developer tools to debug our native iOS apps.

We just open sourced our project called PonyDebugger. I thought I'd share since a lot of the components that we have open sourced are generally useful outside the context of iPhone apps.

I'd also really like some feedback on our methodology.

Our release blog post is here:

http://corner.squareup.com/2012/08/ponydebugger-remote-debugging.html

and the source and docs can be found here:

https://github.com/square/PonyDebugger

The ponyd tools is universally useful outside the context of iOS.  It basically acts as a gateway for multiple things that can speak the dev tools protocol.  Instead of connecting directly to the provider of the protocol (the mobile device), the provider connects to the gateway, and then the dev tools client connects to it.  This makes it easy to debug things that you can't easily connect to (in the spirit of FTP passive mode).

One other slightly useful gem this open sourced is some good parsing code for Inspector.json: https://github.com/square/PonyDebugger/blob/master/ObjC/generator/parser_types.go

It made it really easy to codegen interfaces for all the domains without having to just iterate through json.

Thanks,

Mike