weinre is Web Inspector Remote. Pronounced like the word "winery". Or maybe like the word "weiner". Who knows, really.

Interesting places:

• GitHub: https://github.com/phonegap/weinre
• Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/weinre
• weinre documentation: http://phonegap.github.com/weinre
• Google Chrome Developer Tools: http://code.google.com/chrome/devtools/docs/overview.html

It's a debugger for web pages, like FireBug (for FireFox) and Web Inspector (for WebKit-based browsers), except it's designed to work remotely, and in particular, to allow you debug web pages on a mobile device such as a phone.

If you aren't familiar with FireBug or Web Inspector, weinre isn't going to make too much sense to you. weinre reuses the user interface code from the Web Inspector project at WebKit, so if you've used Safari's Web Inspector or Chrome's Developer Tools, weinre will be very familiar. If you're not familiar with Web Inspector, the link above to Google Chrome Developer Tools provides some documentation Real Web Inspector, which weinre is based on.

Here's what you can do with it:

Two screen captures are shown above.

The screen capture on the left is from an iPod Touch, running the Mobile Safari app, visiting a browser-based email web site you may be familiar with.

The screen capture on the right is the from a laptop computer, running the weinre debug client, debugging the web page on the left. The DOM being displayed in the elements panel is from the HTML being displayed in the web browser on the iPod Touch.

You might think that green background in the email client is a bit horrifying. It's not normally green. I made it green by executing the following JavaScript code in the weinre console area (as you can see above):

document.body.style.background = "green"

If you are familiar with WebKit's Web Inspector, a partial list of differences between it and weinre are listed below:

• weinre does not make use of any 'native' code, it's all JavaScript (and currently Java code for the 'server').
• Because weinre doesn't use 'native' code, it's functionality is limited. For instance, source level debug of JavaScript is not possible.
• Because weinre doesn't use 'native' code, the debug target code will run on browsers without specialized debug support. For instance, a browser running on your phone.
• weinre supports 'remote' interaction, so you can run the debugger user interface on one machine and can debug a web page running on another machine. For instance, debug a web page displayed on your phone from your laptop.
• Because weinre supports 'remote' interaction, multiple debug clients can be debugging the same debug target at the same time.
• One thing not different from Web Inspector is that the debug client user interface only runs on WebKit-based browsers. Sorry folks.

Find out more by clicking one of the links at the top or bottom of the page - to see a walkthrough of how to use it, visit the Test Drive.

Supported Libraries and Platforms

Generally version numbers listed here are the earliest versions of the relevant thing that have been tested. Later versions of those things are also hopefully supported, but let us know.

Platforms not supported

• iOS 3.1.3 or earlier
• webOS 1.45 or earlier

Libraries not supported

• versions of Prototype.js before version 1.7 are not supported, as they do not support the JSON.stringify() API correctly. You will get an alert() in the web page you are debugging if you attempt to debug it with weinre and you are using an unsupported version of Prototype.js.

Platforms supported - debug client

The browser where the debugger user interface runs.

• weinre Mac application - Mac OS X 10.6 64-bit
• Google Chrome 8.x
• Apple Safari 5.x

Platforms supported - debug target

The browser with the page you are debugging.

• Android 2.2 Browser application
• Android 2.2 w/PhoneGap 0.9.2
• iOS 4.2.x Mobile Safari application
• BlackBerry v6.x simulator
• webOS 2.x (unspecified version)