Opera releases Beta developer tools

WEB BROWSER OUTFIT Opera Software has released the Beta of its open source suite of debugging tools for developers.

Dubbed Dragonfly, Opera's open source toolset will give developers the opportunity to chow down on complex code including full debugging workflow. That means code tweakers can, er, tweak network access and their downloaded resources. They can also correct Javascript issues and "see how CCS rules apply to the DOM."

If you do pop along to Opera to download the toolset, Dragonfly can be set up to launch automatically from the web. Opera has also given Dragonfly a sprinkling of newer web technologies like an SVG Javascript library and Web Storage, which is built on an HTML5 API.

Javascript debugging lets developers use a wider range of toolsets to monitor and tweak their JavaScript code. They can go into the toolsets to see exactly what dodgy coding caused a Javascript failure. Dragonfly has what Opera has called breakpoints panels to do this. These enable developers to check and change all Javascript variables.

Opera refers to its tools as inspectors and there are a number of them. Network Inspector tracks any issues that might cause latency issues with laggy websites and can view cached resources.Resource Inspector does much the same thing but checks all website resources including images, scripts, fonts, HTML files and videos. Storage Inspector manages data collected by websites and gives developers the ability to test cookies and HTML5 Web Storage.

Opera also bragged that Dragonfly can issue a bug report in four steps. Of course, Opera played up its tool suite's name. "Dragonflies eat bugs, and that is exactly what we want it to do for developers around the world," said Opera's chief web opener, David Storey. µ