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Four free power tools for your toolbox. (continued)
If you want to track that pesky problem down and become hero for a day, you'll need a big, shiny, red toolbox. In that toolbox you'll need a set of power tools that allow you to peer deep into the internals and see precisely what's going on.
Below are some of the most effective tools I've found--tools that no serious Web developer should be without. These tools let you send HTTP requests from the command line, analyze complete browser/server conversations over time, examine HTTP request/response headers, slurp entire Web sites, and stress test your server to the breaking point.
Best of all, they can all be downloaded for free!
Curl
Curl is a magnificent little utility that allows you to send HTTP queries to Web servers from the command line.
Curl allows you to set a wide variety of options and parameters for the queries you send to the server. These options and parameters mean you can handcraft queries, send them to a Web server, and examine the response in detail.
Curl's features list is extensive and covers most of the modern protocols and standards for accessing Web servers. A selection of Curl's key features from the list includes HTTP/1.1, GET, PUT, HEAD, POST, authentication, including Basic, Digest, NTLM, follow redirects, custom headers (replace/remove internally generated headers), custom user-agent string, custom referrer string, proxy support, content-encoding support for deflate and GZIP, certificates, SSL (SSLv2, SSLv3 or TLSv1), FTP, FTPS, TELNET, LDAP, DICT, and GOPHER.
Curl is free, open source, and is available for almost any modern operating system.
LiveHTTPHeaders
One thing Web browsers normally keep concealed is the HTTP request and response headers. Even selecting "view source" won't show you the headers.
When a Web browser sends a request to a Web server it sends a small amount of extra information, known as the request header. When a Web server sends a response to a Web browser is also sends a small amount of extra information, known as the response header.
For example, a request header sent to the browser from the server might look like this:
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.slashdot.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
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An HTTP response header is additional information send by the server to the browser when returning an HTTP page in response to a request. For example, a response header sent from the server to the client might look like this:
HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2004 00:40:23 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.29 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a mod_perl/1.29
SLASH_LOG_DATA: shtml
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000
X-Fry: I'm going to continue never washing this cheek again.
Cache-Control: private
Pragma: private
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
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