When I caught wind of the Django Debug Toolbar a couple weeks ago, I was really excited to put it to use. However, when i wired it up, I discovered that it wasn't going to play nicely with MooTools since it is based on jQuery.
Not being a javascript expert, I am assuming there is some global namespace collisions in how the two libraries use shortcut functions like the dollar sign selectors (e.g. $('some-dom-element')).
Anyway, the more I thought about it, I figured it probably best to not manipulate the DOM at all. In some discussion with others, it was determined a very useful adaptation to the project would be to serialize off all the data collected in the middleware on the server and set a cookie to a special path so that it could be retrieved via something like a bookmarklet.
So that's what I did. I forked the Django Debug Toolbar project and renamed it to Django Debug Un-Toolbar, real original, I know. While I don't expect it to be perfect yet (I spent about 2 hours this evening making sweeping and hurried changes to the code base), it does work as intended.
There are a number of things I want to add/change before I dare think about using in production. Yes, I think it would be useful to have in production, and triggered to turn on in a number of different ways -- either through changing a settings parameter to passing it a special query string parameter, or working for certain users.
By having the debug "toolbar" work in this manner it will be possible to collect all this good debug information from customers who's screens are unavailable to see when things inevitable go wrong and you need to troubleshoot things quickly.
Update
I am closing the Un-Toolbar fork in favor of the other fork that i created that is more upstream compatible. Hopefully that fork is only temporary as well as I'd hope to get it worthy of merging back to Rob's repository.
Comments
jQuery works with all other libraries in many ways. The easiest is to remove the $ namespace from jquery by doing $j = jQuery.noConflict();
then use $j() or jQuery() instead of $() when you want to use jquery...
Why not just talk with Django Debug toolbar in order to find a common way that suits all needs instead of just forking it ?
I'm not sure that forking is the right way to provide a powerfull (whatever it means) debug toolbar... :-/
Aha! Nice, I really prefer to keep things separate from my DOM while I can. This really looks like the right way to go.
That's mooTools' fault, not jQuery's. That's why I refuse to use a JavaScript library that adds functionality to built-in objects and messes with the global namespace.
You could have named it Django Debug Moolbar... ;P
@Andreas: good point and that sounds like an excellent patch.
@NiCoS: You make a good point and am in communication with Rob Hudson on what the best approach is to do this. I have some ideas and hopefully a more compatible solution will be in the works in short order. Shouldn't be that difficult now that I have slept on the idea and proved the concept.
@David: Thanks! Glad you find it useful.
@Simon Willison: I don't care about what library's fault it is. I was just working towards a solution for my situation and thought I'd share.
@Arien: I am not using MooTools (or any other javascript library in my solution).
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Glad to read such things :-)
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