At the recent Build 2015 event, Microsoft announced the launch of an open source extensible tool for debugging JavaScript called Vorlon.js. Vorlon.js is powered by Node.js and you can remotely connect to a maximum of 50 devices simultaneously to run your JavaScript code with a single click. You can then see the results in your Vorlon.js dashboard. The same team that brought WebGL to the JavaScript world with the launch of Babylon.js is also the team that created this powerful remote debugging JavaScript tool.

The idea behind creating Vorlon.js was to allow developers to better collaborate with JavaScript code and debug together. The code written by one person will be visible to all and the experience is browser agnostic. No dependency, just pure play JavaScript, HTML, CSS running on the target devices.

The tool itself is a lightweight web server that can be installed locally or run from a server for the team to access the dashboard which acts as the central command centre and communicates with all the remote devices. The tool is also extensible with a plug-in framework that developers can use to create extensible plug-ins. It already comes with a few out of the box plug-ins to view console logs, inspect the DOM, and display the JavaScript variable tree using the Object Explorer.

It is very easy to start using Vorlon.js. First install the NPM package using the Node.js console:

$ npm i -g vorlon

To start running the tool, type the vorlon command:

$ vorlon

Now you have it running on the localhost port 1337 by default. To start monitoring your application you can add reference to the following script:

Here SESSIONID is any string that can uniquely identify the application. You can ignore it as well, in which case it is replaced by default. You can start seeing the output, DOM, and console log in the dashboard by navigating to the following URL:

http://localhost:1337/dashboard/SESSIONID

You are now all set to use Vorlon.js.