Saturday, December 31, 2011

On the Seventh Day of PhoneGapping: Debugging

One of the truly horrible things about doing web application development on mobile phones is the lack of web development tools that you'd see in modern desktop web browsers. Luckily for us a couple of folks have made it a lot easier to do web dev with tools like weinre by Patrick Mueller and iWebInspector by Maximiliano Firtman. I'm going to spend my time talking about weinre not because iWebInspector isn't as good but because I spend most of my time in Android land so I'm much more familiar with weinre.

The description from the home page:

"weinre is a debugger for web pages, like FireBug (for FireFox) and Web Inspector (for WebKit-based browsers), except it's designed to work remotely, and in particular, to allow you debug web pages on a mobile device such as a phone."

Isn't that great? You can have the developer tools you are used to back in your greedy little hands again.

The weinre home page has detailed instructions on how to setup your own server, which is not that difficult, but if you are like me (i.e. lazy) there is already a server setup for you at debug.phonegap.com where getting started is only three steps away. 


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1 comment:

  1. sromalewskiJanuary 3, 2012 at 9:27 AM

    Thanks for these posts, they're great! Thanks especially for alerting me to the phonegap weinre server. I haven't been able to set up weinre on my local machine (dumb mistakes on my part, most likely), so pointing to debug.phonegap.com is very helpful. Simple, and works like a charm.

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