Monday 20 August 2012

Networking Dashboard v01

Networking Dashboard is a tool that shows internals of networking of Firefox. It's an add-on that I have made as part of GSoC project and can be used by typing 'about:networking-dashboard' in URL bar after installing this add-on. It shows current open connections with host names, how many of them are active/idle, if they are using SPDY or not, if they are using SSL or not, DNS cache entries, total data sent and received, data related to WebSocket connections etc. I have blogged about it in detail in my previous post.
Following are some screen shots which might give you some idea about the tool.
Timeline shows graphical view of total data sent and received after starting the add-on.
One feature that I couldn't implement as part of add-on is header window which shows sent and received headers of the packets Http connections.

I have used jQuery and flot - a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery -  for building the add-on. I can make the add-on available but it won't work because back end part of the code hasn't been migrated to mozilla-central yet.

Http Connections

Socket Connections

DNS cache entries

WebSocket connections


Timeline showing graph of total data sent and received



Monday 13 August 2012

GSoC update

So far I have finally finished implementing back-end interfaces- nsIHttpConnectionLog.idl, nsiWebSocketConnectionLog.idl, nsISocketLog.idl and nsIDNSEntries.idl. for Networking Dashboard.
Now, only thing remains is a UI for the add-on using these interfaces. It's very important part of the project since it will make sense of the json strings returned by these interfaces. Without a UI they are merely strings of data. I will probably be using jquery UI for this. It will be a tabular UI, a tab per interface/feature. Implementation of UI will conclude my GSoC project.