Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Linux/mac alternative to Fiddler - WebScarab!

I really enjoy using fiddler - that is web logging proxy, or, the way it is called - a web debugger.

It works very easy way:

  1. When started, modifies the Internet Explorer proxy settings to point them on  itself.
  2. All the request are logged and ready to be analyzed then. 
  3. As much of the software does use IE proxy settings for its own setup, non-straightforward things as SOAP calls, Ajax, embedded-browser calls may also be caught. 
  4. With the captured interchange, one can analyze every aspect of a single roundtrip.
The only thing I dislike about it is its nature - .Net built, it works flawlessly on MS platform, but not on Linux.

The good and working alternative I have found is webscarab project, which is written in java, looks pretty much the same, and does most of the same job. Easy thing. Just run it with java-jar and setup your software to proxy through 127.0.0.1:8008.

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