Safari's Websocket Stream View

I've mentioned before that Adventurer's Codex uses XMPP over WebSockets for it's live-chat and party features, and we're planning to add lots more of these kinds of features in the future. That being said, as a developer, I've had a pretty difficult time building features that rely on WebSockets because it's kind of annoying to see exactly what is being sent and received over the connection. I know that Chrome has some features to help with developing WebSocket applications, but I've never had a good experience with them, and I use Safari as my default browser for both casual use and for web development.

That said, I stumbled across a new WebSocket Stream View in Safari's Dev Tools and, just like when I discovered that Git supports notes, I got really excited. Clicking on an active WebSocket connection now brings up a live timeline of every message sent and received by the browser over that connection. It even shows the ping/pong frames that the browser occasionally sends to verify that the connection is still open.

safari websocket viewer

Safari's New WebSocket Stream View

I'm hoping that this new view will make it a lot easier to debug problems because I can now see exactly what's being sent over the connection. I'm not sure when this was added to the Safari Dev Tools, but it's definitely very welcome.


Filed under: development, software, programming, adventurer's codex, xmpp
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