Tuesday, July 03, 2007

MozRepl: Scripting Firefox from the inside out

Thanks to the emacsspeak blog I learned about MozRepl - a plug-in for Firefox that allows you to interactively script it in JavaScript.

The description:

Connect to Firefox and other Mozilla apps, explore and modify them from the inside, while they're running.

Execute Javascript, play with browser GUI, sneak into HTML pages, examine functions and variables, redefine them on the fly, hot-fix bugs, ... MozRepl itself is programmable from within MozRepl!

There's even a slick emacs mode that makes interacting with the REPL easy.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not quite sure I see the use of scripting Firefox in this way. But, as my debugging session yesterday showed, an interactive REPL can make all the difference in working with a live system.

I'm off to ponder the Tutorials and Examples section of the docs. This is cool stuff, I tell ya. Very cool stuff.

For more on being a true emacs/Firefox geek, check out Firefox for Emacs Part 1 and Part 2.

Funny, I don't recall anyone scripting Firefox from inside Eclipse. ;-)

No comments:

Post a Comment