A web developer's dream come true
Back in June I talked about packet-sniffers and how important it was that we all owned and used at least one. What I also mentioned was that I wasn't overawed by any of them and wished I knew enough to make my own. What I've always wanted is a sniffing app that was easy to use, unobtrusive and tailored to the web developer. Well, I'm happy to report that my dreams have finally come true. Say hello to Simtec's HttpWatch Exloper Bar.
Start HttpWatch and load a page. Everything you ever wanted (and didn't want) to know gets logged in its panels. Header info. Query string arguments. Cookies. Etc etc. It's also a nice way to see the content of CSS and JavaScript files without having to mess around in the source code. Useful for debugging code. Wondering why your new JavaScript function doesn't work? Check the actual code that is being sent to the browser. Your new styles not showing up? Make sure it's not a cached copy of the stylesheet.
There are endless uses for it and it's hard to quantify just how useful it can be. For example. Next time your pulling your hair out wondering why your form isn't saving all fields, look at the POST data being sent and check it's actually sent. Ethereal has saved my bacon on more than one occasion. It's a horrible piece of software though which, hopefully, I won't have cause to use again.
Nothing is perfect though. HttpWatch comes with a hefty price-tag of $195 which I am yet to justify to myself. Also, it's IE only. Fear not though. There's a free, albeit inferior, alternative for Firebird called Live HTTP Headers.
Update: John Marshall has been in touch with Simtec and they have put an offer on for us all. Until the end of the month you can now get it for the discounted price of $79. Now I really am tempted.
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Nice one - will b giving those a look.
The HttpWatch demo works really well and it seems to have everything I need. Also it would save me using Ethereal which needs restarting every time I capture a session on my PC.
Pity about the price though. I sent them a feedback e-mail indicating they might want to revise it. Due to the fact that they would probably make more money on individual purchases than business licenses. Just look at the success of TopStyle.
I wonder if I'll get an answer
So much for keeping it under your hat.
I couldn't help myself and took a peek at the hex. If anyone is interested, the plugin was written in C++ using AFX... AND BOOST. Boost is a rather eclectic open source c++ lib making community. Pretty unforgiving of stupid questions in their newsgroups too... but, they have a lot of extremly efficient libs. So, I'm pretty confident this little gem is rocking as far as efficiency goes. Definitely no performance hits here for having it running. If anyone is writting C++, it's worth a look at their main page...
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BAH! This is simply a redundant app attempting to make money from a deficient browser.
You're forgetting that Firebird/Mozilla already does all this as standard. On the website it says you can see this:
* URLs being accessed
* HTTP method, e.g. GET, POST, etc...
* Mime type of response, e.g. text/html image/gif
* Time taken to complete a request
* Size of downloaded page, image or file
* HTTP status codes or error codes if the request failed.
* Cookies sent and received
* Headers sent and received
* Parameters sent in a query strings and POSTs
* Network operations required, such as DNS lookup or socket connects
* Whether the content was read from the browser cache or downloaded from the HTTP server
Save yourself a pile of money and use Firebird for web-dev: right-click and choose "View Page Info"
Not to mention the live http headers extention (mentioned by Jake) but also the other web-dev extensions that also enable you to view style/view cookies/ disable or switch stylesheets, highlight block elements and many many more all for free.
Firebird really works great,I use it since a couple of weeks. The first browser since a long time to replace IE !
Andrew, mt,
I don't suppose I could enlist you to convince my corporate client to switch over?
:-)
Without wanting to get in to it, I just have to say I really don't agree that IE is a redundant browser.
"BAH! This is simply a redundant app attempting to make money from a deficient browser."
Conversely - this is an awesome app making up for one of the deficiencies of what is otherwise an excellent browser!
This app will save me SO much time I am going to bug the crap out of my boss until he buys it for me.
My portal system (IE only) is based on XML islands - and this tell sme the content from all the islands without having to open all of them in a separate window when they do not work. Massive time saver.
On a more personal note, it allows me to pull all the swf files from nickjr.com so I can play them offline for my son :)
Jake I could kiss you were it not for the obvious trouble it would get us both in ;)
Ahhh I see now. This is obviously the 'software industry ecology' that Microsoft tells us open source software is destroying.
On the other hand, I guess that if you're stuck with a 'IE only' situation there are no other options and this software would become useful.
Think about it, though, you are paying a premium to make up for it. Does this sort of thing get included in your total cost of ownership analysis?
Also, I've recently been building web apps using the XMLHTTPRequest capabilities of IE and Mozilla to retrieve XML data. Turns out that making cross-browser javascript for this is pretty easy.
What will probably happen is:
a) Microsoft will buy this and swallow it inot the next version of IE, or
b) Microsoft will magically create exactly the same functionality in their next release (except really useful bits will not work/crash/let secure information be braodcast across the net/broadcast all your secure information across the net) and in the ensuing litigation Simtec will be nankrupted and swallowed by Microsoft.
I decided it's worth the money today. Especially with the nice discount. Thanks John!
Not wanting to further get the getting into it gotten into, IE is the corporate standard at so many larger companies for a reason, lads.
:-D
JErry
Patrick : nah they'll probably make it part of visual studio and create the need for VS to do jscript.net.
Jerry: I really don't think there's a reason other than companies have just used windows and accepted IE while Netscape was dead and Moz wasn't around. Thus the concept of the 'IE only intranet' was born.
The idea of 'open standards' is not as popular when discussing intranets, than it is with websites (Yet) so I assume it's never been taken into serious consideration.
Right you are, Andrew. It was unfair of me to make it sound like it was a good reason... ;-)
We have been using this tool for some months and it works great for debugging(web)flash-applications. Great to hear that firebird has options to show all kinda page info, but will that also reveal http request from the flash-(swf) object in an html-page ? HttpWatch does, and it does it very well.
Walter. I would guess it would do but can't be 100% sure. There's only one way to find out...
This is a developers dream come true
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