Glimpse 1.0 enables server-side debugging

The developers of Glimpse, the open source web application diagnostics tool for Windows-based servers, have released version 1.0 of their software. The developers describe Glimpse 1.0 as: "stable, RTW, final – call it what you’d like, but it’s certainly good!" and refer to a large number of bug fixes in the release; the project also redesigned its web site for the occasion.

Glimpse, which is described as being to server-side applications "what Firebug is to debugging your client-side code", allows developers to debug their web applications from a browser widget. The client-side part of Glimpse does this by connecting to a server-side module that collects debugging information and sends it back in a JSON format. This allows developers to track requests, data output and routing, as well as interactions with the data models of ASP.NET applications.

Glimpse requires IIS6 or later with ASP.NET installed. It is mostly being developed by Red Gate and currently supports ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC applications. PHP and Ruby on Rails support is expected "soon". The packages that are needed to use Glimpse with an application can be installed through the NuGet package manager in Visual Studio. The tool is made up of the client-side component (called Glimpse) and the Glimpse.AspNet, Glimpse.Mvc3 and Glimpse.Mvc2 components. Source code for the project is available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 License.

(fab)