Glimpse for ASP.NET Website
By admin on Aug 29, 2011 in .NET, open source
Glimpse is an amazing product that allows you to see exactly what’s going on in your web server. Currently, it works for any ASP.NET website and even has specific extensions for specific frameworks like (ASP.NET MVC, etc.).
Besides just supporting frameworks such as these out of the box, Glimpse has an architecture that fundamentally supports the future development of Server side implementations of Glimpse for other non-ASP.NET based system in the future.
Glimpse plugins, either built into Glimpse, or provided by third parties or yourself run on the server and collect all server side information that will aid in debugging (i.e. application settings, routes, session variables, trace data, etc.)
Before the response is send, the Glimpse formats the data collected by the plugins in accordance with the Glimpse Protocol and serializes it as JSON
Depending on whether it is an Ajax request or not, the server embeds the JSON in an HTTP Header or in the content of the page.
JavaScript on the clients picks up the JSON data sent by the server components and displays and dynamically renders a client side UI (similar to Firebug Lite) that lets you view this data.
Glimpse can be turned on or off by a series of different mechanistic, but at its core if the Glimpse cookie is present the server will provide the "debug" data – as a security measure, the request for debug data is "authenticated". Via the plugin model, this authentication check can have any logic that is required by the site to ensure that unauthorized users don’t have access to sensitive debug data.
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