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[orion-dev] Orion Firebug integration

I have the prototype I created back in March working again. Here I am trying to assess my experiences and discuss where to go from here.

My original plan had two converging parts:
   1) Put Orion in a Firebug panel and integrate it with the Firebug UI.
2) use the embedded Orion editor (read-only) to replace Firebug's source viewer. This was strictly to reuse code, no user-visible changes. As we gained experience I hoped we could merge these parts so users with Orion would seamlessly switch from debug to edit.

I've had to modify the first path. With the editor/examples/embeddedEditor.html I am not able to get editing to work again. Sometime after I fill the editor with content, the editorContainer goes blank. I spent several days trying to track this down without success. I may never know the cause of the blanking, but I do know why I was unsuccessful: the Mozilla platform has no practical debugger essential for integrating two complex applications. To continue this work I'd have to go back and work on Chromebug (firebug for firefox extensions). I don't think that is practical with all of the churn on the Firebug and Firefox side.

Instead I just open a new Firefox window with Orion. (Then I can use Firebug on that window to debug the integration). This path will not lead to the kind of experience I hoped to create, but I think it could be a useful result.

The approach I used for the panel embedding seems completely wrong for window-level integration. What I'd like to do is 'plugin' to Orion, so when Firebug opens Orion to edit, events from Orion result in callService() calls to Firebug and vice versa. I wrote a simple service registration similar to Orion's so I think I understand the basic mechanism.

Is there enough interest among the people on this list in this path to help me figure out how to proceed?

jjb




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