Every now and then, my consulting duties cause me to stumble upon a really useful and well-designed program, and when that happens, it’s my pleasure to share it with you all. (Yes, I grew up in Texas.) Today, that program has the rather unusual name of “Charles,” and it is quite the handy utility if you have any involvement in web development, either internal or external.
Charles ($50 for a single-user license) is an HTTP proxy-slash-reverse-proxy, and it sits between a browser or server and your network connection to spy on HTTP traffic, and log it for future inspection. The program also shows the contents of cookies, HTML files, CSS files, and JavaScript files that transit the network interface. The interface is clean and to the point. Unlike some other similar tools I’ve used, compatibility is good: the program works with both IE and FireFox, and it also works in Vista and Server 2008 as well as XP. Another useful feature is bandwidth throttling: you can simulate slower connections. (Too bad you can’t simulate faster ones!) The only glitch I noticed is that I would occasionally get a “bad certificate” error when using Charles on certain websites that, in fact, had perfectly good certificates.
Charles would be a good way for budding webmasters to develop a deeper understanding of HTTP traffic, optimize their own site designs, identify intranet traffic bottlenecks, and simulate website performance on a variety of connection types. Visit www.charlesproxy.com if this sounds like a tool you could use. You can play with it for awhile without paying, although the eval “honeymoon” is rather short (which it probably should be).
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