Web/E-business /

A click off the old bot

By Mark Gibbs
Network World, 05/07/01

We just got back from the National Association of Broadcasters exhibition in Las Vegas, so our wireless coverage will be delayed a couple of weeks.

This week we'll indulge in a diversion into the netherworld of Web servers with a neat Windows utility called Click Bot from Gem Software.

This is a useful tool you will appreciate if you have ever had to debug Web applications. In essence, Click Bot is a simple Web browser interface that lets you send data to a Web server and see the raw content returned. Installation is simple and takes less than 1 minute.

When run, Click Bot presents a simple user interface with a field for entering URLs, a box for Web server output (with buttons to copy its contents to the clipboard or save it to a file), along with more fields for submitting CGI form data, adding a referrer URL (so you can lie to a Web server about which server you got its URL from) and a cookie string (so you can fake cookie data).

The tool supports HTTP get and post operations in single and multiple execution modes. And by checking boxes, you can select whether cookies should be sent, if the server response should be shown, whether only headers should be displayed (that is, no display of page contents and the connection to the Web server is closed as soon as the header is read) and whether the server's response is even read at all.

You will occasionally notice that a number of buttons on the Click Bot user interface are grayed out. This is because the server is keeping the connection open (that's the "stay alive" feature that is used to optimize the throughput between a server and a browser). There's a button that lets you manually close the connection to a Web server.

As much as we like this tool, Click Bot has some deficiencies. We'd like to be able to talk to Web servers on ports other than the standard HTTP port 80. A more ambitious requirement would be to have support for Secure HTTP.

We'd also like to see field entries stored for later use - for example, you might want to recall form data for reuse - and we'd like a logging function that records request sent and response received for multiple requests. In the current version, each request clears the response window, and collecting a sequence of transactions would be amazingly tedious.

Another issue is the inability to copy just part of the server response - for example, the cookie string sent by the server. You'll have to use a text editor to copy the cookie to Click Bot's cookie specification field. And we'd like to see an estimation of throughput achieved when a multiple request is generated.

Complaints notwithstanding, Click Bot is useful and at $30, a reasonable buy. We award Click Bot five gear teeth out of 10.

We like this utility, but we'd also like to hear from you if you have a better tool. Recommendations to gearhead@gibbs.com.