We’ve seen how to use Caffeine to livecode the webpage in which we’re running. With its support for the Chrome Remote Debugging Protocol (CRDP), we can also use it to livecode every other page loaded in the web browser.

Some Help From the Inside

To make this work, we need to coordinate with the Chrome runtime engine. For CRDP, there are two ways of doing this. One is to communicate using a WebSocket connection; I wrote about this last year. This is useful when the CRDP client and target pages are running in two different web browsers (possibly on two different machines), but with the downside of starting the target web browser in a special way (so that it starts a conventional webserver).

The other way, possible when both the CRDP client and target pages are in the same web browser, is to use a Chrome extension. The extension can communicate with the client page over an internal port object, created by the chrome.runtime API, and expose the CRDP APIs. The web browser need not be started in a special way, it just needs to have the extension installed. I’ve published a Caffeine Helper extension, available on the Chrome Web Store. Once installed, the extension coordinates communication between Caffeine and the CRDP.

Attaching to a Tab

In Caffeine, we create a connection to the extension by creating an instance of CaffeineExtension:

CaffeineExtension new inspect

As far as Chrome is concerned, Caffeine is now a debugger, just like the built-in DevTools. (In fact, the DevTools do what they do by using the very same CRDP APIs; they’re just another JavaScript application, like Caffeine is.) Let’s open a webpage in another tab, for us to manipulate. The Google homepage makes for a familiar example. We can attach to it, from the inspector we just opened, by evaluating:

self attachToTabWithTitle: 'Google'

Changing Feelings

Now let’s change something on the page. We’ll change the text of the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. We can get a reference to it with:

tabs onlyOne find: 'Feeling'

When we attached to the tab, the tabs instance variable of our CaffeineExtension object got an instance of ChromeTab added to it. ChromeTabs provide a unified message interface to all the CRDP APIs, also known as domains. The DOM domain has a search function, which we can use to find the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. The CaffeineExtension>>find: method which uses that function answers a collection of search results objects. Each search result object is a proxy for a JavaScript DOM object in the Google page, an instance of the ChromeRemoteObject class.

In the picture above, you can see an inspector on a ChromeRemoteObject corresponding to the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, an HTMLInputElement DOM object. Like the JSObjectProxies we use to communicate with JavaScript objects in our own page, ChromeRemoteObjects support normal Smalltalk messaging, making the JavaScript DOM objects in our attached page seem like local Smalltalk objects. We only need to know which messages to send. In this case, we send the messages of HTMLInputElement.

As with the JavaScript objects of our own page, instead of having to look up external documentation for messages, we can use subclasses of JSObject to document them. In this case, we can use an instance of the JSObject subclass HTMLInputElement. Its proxy instance variable will be our ChromeRemoteObject instead of a JSObjectProxy.

For the first message to our remote HTMLInputElement, we’ll change the button label text, by changing the element’s value property:

self at: #value put: 'I''m Feeling Happy'

The Potential for Dynamic Web Development

The change we made happens immediately, just as if we had done it from the Chrome DevTools console. We’re taking advantage of JavaScript’s inherent livecoding nature, from an environment which can be much more comfortable and powerful than DevTools. The form of web applications need not be static files, although that’s a convenient intermediate form for webservers to deliver. With generalized messaging connectivity to the DOM of every page in a web browser, and with other web browsers, we have a far more powerful editing medium. Web applications are dynamic media when people are using them, and they can be that way when we develop them, too.

What shall we do next?

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