Charles Proxy

I want to make everyone aware of another great tool for your coding toolbox,Charles Web Debugging Proxy. Charles Proxy is somewhat similar to Firebug which was mentioned in a previous post by Colin. As stated on the Charles Proxy website http://www.charlesproxy.com/, "Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP and SSL / HTTPS traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers (which contain the cookies and caching information)."


Some Feature of Charles Proxy:

Browser Agnostic
For all you die hard browser fanatics out there (insert Matt Mager's name here) Charles Proxy works out of the box with IE, Firefox (Need to download an extension), and Opera

Operating System Agnostic
Runs on Windows, MAC OS, and LINUX

SSL Proxying - View SSL requests and responses in plain text

bandwidth Throttling - Simulates slower internet connections including latency
This is a great feature when you want to test out your web development with the bandwidth simulation of one of your target users

AJAX Debugging - Supports XML and JSON natively so you can View XML and JSON requests and responses as a tree or text. This feature would have come in handy when I was having issues retrieving JSON data for the second iteration of my personal project

Breakpoints to intercept and edit requests or responses -
You are able to insert a break point and edit requests to test different inputs

Validate recorded HTML, CSS, and RSS/atom responses using the W3C validator

Charles Proxy comes with a 30 day trial where at the end of the trial you will have to purchase for $50.00. From a business standpoint the $400 site license or $700 multi-site license seem the best way to go.

Just to reiterate Charles Proxy supports AJAX Debugging so can youcan so you can View XML and JSON requests and responses as a tree or text.

Enjoy!!!