XK72 | Java and Adobe Flash Software

Charles v2.6 has been released today. You can download it from the usual place. Thank you to everyone that helped during the beta period, especially Matthew Buchanan who was the inspiration for the visual improvements and finder of the icon set.

The list of changes:

• Major UI overhaul, including the use of Quaqua and
  JGoodies libraries to improve the native
  look and feel on Mac OS X and Windows respectively.
• Internal windows removed and replaced by a tab navigation if multiple sessions are open.
• Sequence view now uses a table when in Wide layout, to show a quick summary of important attributes.
• XML tree display. View XML documents in a tree format as well as the existing pretty-printed text format.
• XML pretty-printed text format improved to not load DTDs.
• JSON and JSON-RPC support.
• SOAP support.
• AMF3 parsing improvements.
• AMF parser now displays during the response download and shows download progress.
• Fixed nil dereference in Mac OS X proxy configuration in some configurations.
• Rewrite Tool body rules now support non-type mime types and improved debugging output.

Thanks for your feedback on the previous beta versions. I’ve added a few things to the latest beta, and I’m hoping this is the last (or at least second to last) before release.

Download the latest beta here

The recent additions are:

SOAP support. SOAP messages were always viewable as pretty-printed XML, or now as an XML tree; finally Charles presents a higher level view of SOAP messages in the same RPC format as for AMF (request and response on the same screen). I’d appreciate some feedback from developers who do SOAP development!

JSON-RPC support. Extending the JSON support already in the 2.6 betas with support for JSON-RPC. This provides an enhanced view (request and response on the same screen) for people using JSON-RPC.

Info column in sequence view. The info column gives a brief preview of what is in the request/response. For images it shows the dimensions; for SWFs it shows the dimensions, version and fps; for AMF/Flash Remoting and JSON-RPC it shows the method names. This lets you find the requests you’re looking for faster.

The info column will be expanding in the next release of Charles to support more types. Also I think a similar facility can be added to the structure view when it’s in wide mode.

Please let me know if you discover any problems or if you have any suggestions.

The past few weeks I’ve been working on improving the look, feel and usability of Charles. I’ve made a beta version available for download, please feel free to try it out and send me feedback. http://xk72.com/charles/beta.php

There are new icons for the toolbar and the tree. They come from http://www.icondrawer.com/. I’ve also integrated the excellent Swing GUI fixing libraries; Quaqua for Mac OS X and JGoodies for Windows, which help tidy up a few of the Swing look and feel oddities. This also explains why the download file size has ballooned!

The main interface has also changed; there are no longer internal frames with title bars, instead the current session is part of the main window, with tabs appearing when you have more than one session open. I believe that most users work with a single open session so this reclaims several pixels of screen real estate for you.

The sequence view now defaults to a vertical layout and shows a table, enabling you to see more details about each request/response without clicking on it. You can change this behaviour in the Preferences.

The request and response panels now default to combining headers and body viewers into the one set of tabs, rather than in two separate sets of tabs. This reduces the amount of chrome on the screen and is especially useful when you’re in vertical layout mode and vertical space is at a premium! Again you can change this behaviour in the Preferences.

There’s also JSON support and XML viewing as a tree as well as the existing pretty-printed text view.

There you go. As always I appreciate your feedback, and welcome suggestions.

cheers,
Karl