I’m an HTTP geek. RFC 2616 is my best friend.
This means two things. First, I need more friends. And second, I need a tool that’ll show me what my HTTP and HTTPS requests are doing under the covers. (After all, best friends shouldn’t have any secrets.)
I can dig up this information in PHP pretty quickly using cUrl: curl_exec() gives me the headers and body of a response, and the CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT argument to curl_getinfo() yields the headers for the last request on the specified resource. But there’s no easy way to obtain the request body, which can be critical when debugging multi-part POST issues. Plus, this trick is limited to PHP. There’s no easy way to examine the request/response headers of an HTTP request using .NET’s HttpWebRequest, for example. And what if I want to examine how another popular Web application, such as Gmail or a REST API, works at the protocol level?
There are commercial applications that will expose HTTP request/response pairs, but they cost an arm and a leg. Fortunately, those of us slinging code on Windows can download Eric Lawrence’s freeware application Fiddler2. Built on .NET Framework 2.0, Fiddler2 tells you all you want to know about every HTTP and HTTPS transaction on your machine. You can view request and response headers as a Treeview, hex code, or a raw header dump. Fiddler2 automatically captures traffic from Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Opera, and can capture Firefox requests and responses with a minor tweak. Read more: codingthis.com
This means two things. First, I need more friends. And second, I need a tool that’ll show me what my HTTP and HTTPS requests are doing under the covers. (After all, best friends shouldn’t have any secrets.)
I can dig up this information in PHP pretty quickly using cUrl: curl_exec() gives me the headers and body of a response, and the CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT argument to curl_getinfo() yields the headers for the last request on the specified resource. But there’s no easy way to obtain the request body, which can be critical when debugging multi-part POST issues. Plus, this trick is limited to PHP. There’s no easy way to examine the request/response headers of an HTTP request using .NET’s HttpWebRequest, for example. And what if I want to examine how another popular Web application, such as Gmail or a REST API, works at the protocol level?
There are commercial applications that will expose HTTP request/response pairs, but they cost an arm and a leg. Fortunately, those of us slinging code on Windows can download Eric Lawrence’s freeware application Fiddler2. Built on .NET Framework 2.0, Fiddler2 tells you all you want to know about every HTTP and HTTPS transaction on your machine. You can view request and response headers as a Treeview, hex code, or a raw header dump. Fiddler2 automatically captures traffic from Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Opera, and can capture Firefox requests and responses with a minor tweak. Read more: codingthis.com
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