Difference between revisions of "JSDT/Debug/Crossfire"

Revision as of 12:00, 18 May 2012

Experimental Project
The JSDT Crossfire project is in the experimental phase and is not part of any official release. To test the support you must build the bundle from source and use the latest source code for Firebug / Crossfire

Overview

Support for remote Firebug using the Crossfire protocol is available in the JSDT development bundles and is provided to allow remote debugging of JavaScript using Firebug via Crossfire.

The bundles provided by JSDT debug for the Firebug / Crossfire support include:

• org.eclipse.wst.jsdt.debug.crossfire - the core Crossfire implementation, provides the Crossfire-specific implementation of JSDI

Setting up a Crossfire Development Workspace

Create a Development Profile

1. Download your desired version of the source from https://github.com/firebug-crossfire/crossfire
2. Create a Firefox profile.
3. Start Firefox with the following argument -ProfileManager - the profile manager will open up allowing you to select or create a profile
4. Create a new profile, make a note of the location that profile information will be stored in

Once done you should have a new profile with your chosen name in your Mozilla directory. For example, in Linux the following directory is created: /home//.mozilla/firefox/ and in Windows 7: <user root>\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles. More information on profiles can be found at Mozillazine.

Finding Extension IDs

The next step requires you to find the ids of the extensions we want to load from source. To do so we have to look in the install.rdf files for each of the extensions. The install.rdf file is located in the root of the extension source, for example [1] is the install.rdf for the master branch of Firebug.

To collect the ID, open the install.rdf file in the directory of the extension you want to install (root, firebug, crossfire) and look for the ID in the section:

<Description about="urn:mozilla:install-manifest">
<em:id>crossfire@almaden.ibm.com</em:id>
<em:name>Crossfire</em:name

Create an Extension Link

Remembering the location of your new development profile, and with the ids of the extensions we want to be installed, we now must create link files to tell Firefox where to find your extensions.

We can do this as follows:

1. Open your profile directory, for example /home//.mozilla/firefox/h34h5.dev
2. Open the extensions subdirectory (create it if it doesn't exist), for example /home//.mozilla/firefox/h34h5.dev/extensions
3. Create a new file named using the extension id (eg: "crossfire@almaden.ibm.com"). Don't add any file extension.
4. Inside the file put a single line containing the absolute path to your source extension

Finish Up

1. Start Firefox with your new development profile and ensure your extensions have been installed properly.
2. Start firefox with either -ProfileManager (and select your profile) or with -P
3. Check the "add-ons" menu to see if your extension installed correctly

Building the Crossfire XPI

To install the Crossfire extension into Firefox you have two choices:

1. grab the pre-built xpi file from getfirebug.com
2. build it from the source and use the File > Open... command within Firefox to open the xpi file

To build the xpi file from source there are only two steps:

1. grab the source you want to package the xpi from - for example the master branch
2. run the handy Ant build file included in the Crossfire /firefox/ folder - for example in the 0.3 branch it can be found here

• • Depending on how you check out the source for Crossfire you would need to edit the build file to make sure the referenced paths are correct.

If you are feeling really ambitious and working in Eclipse, you can configure an external tool builder to automatically build the xpi file for you as you make changes / save you work. More information about configuring external tool builders can be found here and here.