When DevTools was first created many, many years ago the team chose to build a bespoke UI framework. This was a reasonable choice at the time and has served DevTools well.
But since then various features have landed in the platform and one of those, Web Components, is a great fit for building new UI elements in DevTools. By leaning on what the platform provides we can greatly reduce the amount of bespoke UI code we have to maintain and invest more in building features for DevTools, rather than supporting bespoke infrastructure.
To help with the transition, we created a guide to building UI elements in DevTools to share with the wider DevTools team. Some of the guide is bespoke to DevTools and its architecture, which brings its own set of constraints, but some of it are generic guidelines on the approaches we’ve used to build, structure and test Web Components.
Today, we’re making this document publicly available at goo.gle/building-ui-devtools. If you’ve ever wondered more about how Web Components are used in large, real world applications, or some of the challenges that come with integrating components into a large, pre-existing codebase, this document could help and provide some answers. If you have any questions about our guidelines, feel free to tweet me.
Feedback
To discuss the new features and changes in this post, or anything else related to DevTools:
- File definite bug reports and feature requests at Chromium Bugs.
- Discuss possible features, changes, and bugs on the Mailing List.
- Get help on how to use DevTools on Stack Overflow.
- Tweet us at @ChromeDevTools.
- File bugs on this document in the Web Fundamentals repository.
Discover DevTools engineering content
Below is a list of everything that's been covered in the Chrome DevTools Engineering Blog series.
- Debugging WebAssembly with modern tools
- DevTools architecture refresh: migrating to Web Components
- Simulating color vision deficiencies in the Blink Renderer
- Puppetaria: accessibility-first Puppeteer scripts
- How we built the Chrome DevTools WebAuthn tab
- How we built the Chrome DevTools Issues tab
- DevTools architecture refresh: migrating to JavaScript modules
Subscribe to our RSS or Atom feed and get the latest updates in your favorite feed reader!