Charles: Serving HTTP up all day long!
Getting Flash and Webservers to communicate can be like trying to send smoke signals in a hurricaine. Dramatic, yes. But it can be a fustrating exercise. Flash Remoting, Webservices, Flashvars, loading assets all of these ask something of a server. You know what youve asked for but sometimes a response aint happening, so you sit there not knowing whats going on.
The guys i work with have introduced me to a great program called Charles:
Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers (which contain the cookies and caching information).
Im coming to the end of a project which needed Flash to communicate with a java based CMS system, in which i would send requests via LoadVars and the CMS would respond in XML or errors in HTML or nothing all. But during development [in the IDE!] i could see every variable i sent and every response the server sent. Thanks to Charles.
When developing Flash application that make use of the network capabilities of Flash it is difficult to debug as you cannot see the requests and responses. Charles negates this difficulty by making every HTTP request and response easily visible.
This software is the business, i can not recommend it enough. I have a project coming up next week which will use webservices. I cant wait!
