Opera Dragonfly

First weekly build now live

By David Storey. Thursday, 22. May 2008, 15:56:32

developer tools, Opera Dragonfly, weekly

We have just released our first weekly build of Opera Dragonfly today. These are development snap shots and are not guaranteed to be stable, or even work at all. The weekly builds are released to get feedback and testing of the latest changes. If you'd like to report issues please go to the Opera Dragonfly feedback page.

Weekly snap shots will appear on the URL https://dragonfly.opera.com/app/weekly and should automatically update when a new version comes out. The snapshots can be downloaded at http://dragonfly.opera.com/app/weekly/zips/. The regular shipped url will update when official releases are updated.

There have been a number of bug fixes since the first alpha. A list can be found in the change logs. The most notable new features are Command Line completion and the Object Inspector. If you press the tab key when using the Command Line, it will auto-complete the first match. Pressing tab again will cycle through the matches. If you enter a command that returns a Object, you will be able to click on it and inspect the Object in the Object Inspector. This is located in a tab next to the Frame Inspector. Developing this functionality highlighted bugs in recent builds of the Opera Browser, so there are known issues with these features. Entries in the Object Inspector will not expand for example.

Progress is still on course for a second alpha release in the not too distant future. A desktop build will also be released soon that will fix the issues with Opera Dragonfly not working in offline mode, due to a bug with persistent cache not working over HTTPS. We're looking forward to you trying out this and subsequent weekly builds, and any feedback or bug reports that you send.

In somewhat related news, Opera also announced the launch of the Opera Widgets SDK this week. Opera Widgets can be debugged using Opera Dragonfly, and the SDK includes a useful Widgets Emulator for emulating how Widgets will look on different types of devices. Widgets currently work on devices such as the Nintendo Wii and ARCHOS, and upcoming UIQ 3.3 mobile phones. Widgets are currently Opera only, but we are standardising the spec at the W3C and will change our implementation to match the spec when it is finalised. We are also standardising the File I/O API spec at the W3C. This is a new API we have developed to access the file system, and is very useful for Widgets.

Opera Dragonfly, One (and a bit) week inNew Kestrel snapshot fixes Opera Dragonfly issues

Comments

fearphage # 22. May 2008, 16:02

Very nice. I have a formatting suggestion for the changelog.

[12345] Bug description

makes it easy to recognize fixes. Just an idea and a convention more or less. Shorter/easier to type too. Thanks guys. I love the way dragonfly's dev process is going... in addition to dragonfly itself.

Tamil # 22. May 2008, 22:57

profiT # 23. May 2008, 04:53

Wrong content-type for:

http://dragonfly.opera.com/app/weekly/zips/protocol-3/Opera-Dragonfly-08-05-22-14-41.zip

GwenDragon # 23. May 2008, 12:22

Fine to see the efforts in getting better

Sometimes switching to DOM tab crashes Opera with Weekly 10005:
bug-332339 "[devtools] Loading URL and changing to DOM tab crashes Opera"

Very nice. I have a formatting suggestion for the changelog.
[12345] Bug description

Much better changelog description would be like this:
[-] 12345 Bug XYZ fixed
[+] new feature added
[*] changes made
[!] Attention: can crash if ....

Yndi # 23. May 2008, 18:41

I really impressed how you guys forcing new standards, this is great keep on going. It´s annoying that there are many diffrent widget engines out there, yahoo widgeds, adobe flex(well...), microsoft gadgets and tragically they are not campatible at all.
I´m excited what the widgets can do with the file I/O API.
But managing and saving widgets in Opera could be easier, I really can´t understand why they are still not synchronized?

asmodai # 23. May 2008, 21:33

My comment about the drop down selection box for which tab you want to debug was acknowledged the first time around by someone from Opera, do you want me to file an official bug report though? (Since it's still there and makes Dragonfly unusable for me.)

aleto # 24. May 2008, 11:50

do you want me to file an official bug report though?

That's the best way to ensure that an issue gets addressed.

dragonBird # 26. May 2008, 18:07

Moderator edit: Sock puppet account has been banned.

dstorey # 26. May 2008, 19:57

dragonBird: It is an alpha – first alpha at that – so it is obvious that not everything will be working yet. Shouting doesn't help.

Good luck debugging JavaScript with a ruler widget.

Reload is needed as Dragonfly isn't running before it is open. Firebug slows down Firefox, even when it isn't running, as it is still active. Reload is a work around to this problem. It will go away, but needs some Core work first. Reloading the page automatically can loose state, which isn't ideal to do automatically without user intervention.

Broken XPath doesn't tell us much.

Error console is the least developed of the tool, as it is still first alpha. We clearly have plans to add more functionality.