This week’s featured GitHub project, Vorlon.js, is an extensible, platform-agnostic tool for remote JavaScript debugging and testing.

Developed by the Microsoft DirectX team, Vorlon.js is powered by Node.js and the Socket.io real-time event-based communication engine. John Shewchuk, a Microsoft technical fellow and CTO of the Microsoft Developer Platform, introduced Vorlon last week at Build and expanded upon it in a blog post.

“Imagine being able to easily use any browser to debug your website or Web app running anywhere,” he wrote. “What we demonstrated at Build went a little further. In the keynote, I used ManifoldJS to turn a responsive website into mobile applications. In less than a minute, I converted the website into mobile apps for iOS, Android, Chrome, Firefox, Windows 8 and Windows 10. And on Windows 10, it is a universal Windows app that runs across Windows phone, desktop, tablet and Xbox.

“Doing that is very easy—and a pretty cool way to quickly create both a website and all of the mobile apps for the most widely used platforms. Now with Vorlon, you can debug the website and any of these mobile apps—all remotely.”

Vorlon can be installed by adding a single line of JavaScript to a Web app and controlled via the Vorlon dashboard, capable of remotely running on up to 50 devices simultaneously. The remote debugging also includes a DOM inspector as well as the Modernizr JavaScript library for detecting HTML5 and CSS3 features in a user’s browser.

The open-source project is still in its early stages and cannot yet support setting breakpoints, but it has received 115 commits and approximately 900 stars in less than two weeks. More details about Vorlon.js can be found here.

Top 5 projects trending on GitHub this week
#1: JSON Server is a tool for creating a full fake REST API with zero coding in less than 30 seconds. It was created by typicode for front-end developers who need a quick back end for prototyping and mocking.

#2: Ramjet was featured in last week’s Top 5 trending projects.

#3: Clusterize.js is a tiny vanilla JavaScript plug-in that displays large data sets by splitting lists into clusters, showing elements for current scroll position to avoid polluting the DOM with “all used” tags.

#4: MaterialViewPager is a library for Google’s Material Design UI, including logos, toolbars, animations, headers and more.

#5: Sky SDK is an experimental, high-performance UI framework for mobile apps to create UIs and interactively designed apps that run smoothly at 120Hz. Consisting of the Sky C++ engine and the Sky framework, the project is built in Dart with extensible functional programming components.