Our goal at PubNub to make it as easy as possible to start developing real-time apps. Today we are happy to announce the first release of the PubNub Console for Google Chrome.

The PubNub Console is a Google Chrome extension. Once installed, it adds an additional tab especially for PubNub in Google Chrome’s developer tools. You can learn more about developer tools, including how to open the multi-tabbed window with Chrome DevTools for Google Developers.

Want to see it in action and learn more? Check out the video below:

The extension monitors PubNub traffic on the page you are inspecting. Whenever the page publishes or receives a message it shows up in the console for that channel.

Channel tabs are added to the menu on the left when messages are published or subscribed to on the page. You can click on a channel to filter PubNub traffic for that specific channel.

It includes a few special features that makes it easy to develop with real-time messages from protocols like Websockets when using the PubNub JavaScript SDK:

• All output is JSON formatted and color coded for improved dev & debugging happiness.
• Channel output can be cleared by clicking “Clear Output” so you can reset the screen and start fresh.
• If Storage & Playback is enabled on your PubNub account, you can load the previous two minutes of messages in a channel by clicking “Previous 2 minutes.” You can continue clicking this to go back in time.  The next release will add some additional timespan options for more control of stored messages.
• Data persists through navigation so you can refresh the page to see every message PubNub generates.

Additional Chrome WebSocket Tools

If you need a more detailed view of what’s happening behind the scenes, all raw PubNub traffic is available for inspection through the “Network” tab. There is quite a lot of noise here which is why we were inspired to build the new PubNub Chrome Console for you.

If you would like to publish data to a PubNub stream, make presence calls, or experiment with PAM or SSL the PubNub Developer Console offers a fully featured way to interact with PubNub channels.

Be sure to tweet @PubNub with feedback and feature requests for the PubNub Console for Google Chrome. Stay tuned because we are already working on the next feature upgrades to the PubNub Console for Chrome Developers!