Daniel Hiller

NetTool, a great HTTP request handling tool

2009-03-26

nettool http rest 

After being annoyed of the OS X font bug from http4e I searched for a free http request analysis tool, where you can freely manipulate the request. I needed this as I’m currently developing a RESTful webservice which delivers XML and json to clients. The clients had problems in some browsers to get the ajax requests done. So I wanted to check if the right content type and charset was returned if any Accept headers had beend set on the request.

I stumbled upon NetTool and this worked like a breeze. There are only two caveats:

The control characters don’t match their OS X counterparts, so I have to use CTRL+C instead of COMMAND+C to copy values from the text fields

The tunnelling from port 80 does only work as sudo due to user access rights (of course that’s the right thing to do, but coming from windows originally I stepped into the trap at first)