Note: Glimpse 0.17.5 is now out. It offers even more web development productivity features.

Happy New Year!

The Glimpse team hopes you had a wonderful holiday break and wishes you a prosperous new year. We'd also like to make sure it's a little easier for you to develop web applications in 2017, so we keep on improving Glimpse and we're ready to share with you the next release:

0.16.4 Request Tab

Glimpse for Node 0.16.4 includes a new feature, the Request Tab. Glimpse's Request Tab provides information about a selected HTTP request, its response, and the Express middleware that was executed during the life cycle of the request.

Request Tab

Here's a few highlights of the Request Tab:

Perspective

The Request Tab is unique among web developer tooling first and foremost because of the perspective that it offers. Let me explain:

Tooling built into browsers, like Chrome's Dev Tools and Edge's F12 Tools, show you an HTTP request as it was sent by the browser.
Network proxy debugging tools, like Fiddler and Charles, show you an HTTP request as it was on the wire.
Glimpse's Request Tab is different because it shows you an HTTP request as is was when it was received by your app.

This difference in perspective makes Glimpse the perfect tool to inspect and debug any issues resulting from HTTP intermediaries like network "protection" suites, corporate proxy servers, and host/cloud hosting infrastructure. Our uniques perspective doesn't make us better than the other tools, we just complete the debugging story.

Context

Ultimately, Glimpse's main focus is on server side diagnostics. That's why the logging tab was the first tab we shipped, and why future tabs will continue to expose diagnostics from a server perspective.

That may be all well and good, but diagnostics information only makes sense within a given context. To provide that context, Glimpse uses the requests made to your application to automatically create context boundaries in real time - and the Request Tab is your mechanism for understanding that context. While debugging an issue, several questions will often spring to mind: Was the response successful?, What metadata was sent along with the request?, Was an idempotent method being used?... The Request Tab allows you to answer all of those questions in order to put the rest of Glimpse for Node's diagnostics in context.

Input & Output

The bulk of the context provided by the Request Tab is found in the top Request and Response sections.

For each HTTP request/response pair, we provide you with:

The HTTP headers that were received and sent by the application.
The request and response bodies that were received and sent by the application, if applicable.
Any HTTP cookies received or sent by the application.
And any query parameters passed over the the request URL.

Essentially, we display all of the input (a request) and output (a response) that your application handles. But the really cool part, is what we do next:

Request Processing

Not only does the Request Tab provide a unique perspective on HTTP requests, and context for the rest of the diagnostics gathered, it also provides a trace of the middleware that executed while processing the selected request.

Application Middleware

As you can see above, the Application middleware section shows each piece of middleware that was executed for a request, in the order in which it was executed. It also lets you know the filename and line number of where that middleware is registered.

To top it off, the Application middleware section shows you how each piece of middleware affected the response. It will show you:

Which headers were created, modified or deleted by each piece of middleware.
What status code changes were made by each piece of middleware.
Which pieces of middleware wrote to the response body.

This is extreamly helpful for tracking understanding how a response it put together, and seeing where middleware configuration changes are needed.

Next Steps

Glimpse for Node 0.16.4 is available from our private NPM feed right now. Just follow the installation instructions in our Readme to get started.

We hope you love this version of Glimpse. If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to open an issue!

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New Release! Glimpse 0.16.4 #85