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Charles: another debugging proxy

Sat, 2008.03.22 - 13:48 — müzso
http://www.xk72.com/charles/
Charles was my choice of debugging proxy before Fiddler got worked out properly. The initial versions of Charles offered a lot more options, than the initial version of Fiddler. Today both are very feature rich and I'd suggest both to anyone. There're small details that might make you go with one or the other, but basically both are worked out quite well. Charles seemed to be abandoned for a long time (at least I remember that there was not much development at the time I discovered it many years ago), but since v2.x came out development is rolling again. Smile Probably Charles has more features than Fiddler (at least this used to be the case with MS products and their competition ... and with time MS buys out the competition or just bankrupts them via marketing war or other means).

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Thu, 2012.02.09 - 21:25 — müzso

Charles is still my first choice :-)

Fiddler is good only as long as you want to do some basic stuff: use it as a HTTP proxy. But if you want to do something special, you'll have to turn to other solutions ... and there's no better alternative than Charles. Smile Eg. I had to debug a SOAP web service call (that comes from a client app that does not use IE's proxy settings and I don't know -and do not want to learn right now- how to set it up to use a HTTP proxy) and Charles offers the Reverse Proxy functionality which is perfect for the job. I've set up a reverse proxy in Charles listening on some local port, specified the remote host and port of the web service and pointed the client to my local port (where Charles was listening for requests). It worked perfectly and Charles has even structured XML and SOAP tabs for requests and responses so interpreting the data became a lot easier (compared to earlier cases when I had to grab the SOAP request XML from a logfile, put it into jEdit so I could format it into something human-readable and try to find a particular section/element among all the nodes).