Illuminations

Illuminating the web, one framework at a time... see how the web really works!

A browser extension that takes JavaScript frameworks and makes their internals visible, including views, models, class names, and more. Element Highlighting Now, when you hover the mouse over a widget or view, it will highlight the component on the page. It shows you exactly what that object is all about. Contextual Menu When you right click on an element in Chrome, it adds an "Inspect" menu item to open the DevTools and bring you to that element in the Elements panel. Illuminations does the same sort of thing, but tries to find the best match: ideally some sort of UI widget, else an Element or jQuery object. Illumination Panel There is a new panel added to Chrome DevTools called Illuminations. This Illuminations panel is the place to inspect framework objects: Widgets/Views, Data (stores, collections, records, fields), and Elements. These views show the hierarchical structure of your code. It really takes some playing around with all of the above to get a feel of how useful and fun debugging can be again. Side panels include Properties (sorted by the object that defined the property) and Docs that will bring up documentation for the component you are looking at! And whatever you click on can be found in the $l variable in the console -- which is awesome if all the references to that object are hidden in JavaScript closures!