XK72 | Java and Adobe Flash Software

I’m excited to announce the availability of Charles 3.0 public beta!

3.0 adds a number of major new features and enhancements worthy of an increase in major version number. As always, if you’re a registered user your license continues to be valid for this and every future release of Charles.

The important new features are:

• Editing and repeating of requests, including query strings, forms and AMF
• Chart view
• Application icon improved, especially on Windows
• Repeat function can now repeat multiple requests, including iterations and concurrency
• Local mapping tool to use local files as if they are part of a website
• Mapping tool to map parts of one website into another
• and many other enhancements and bug fixes

Editing and repeating requests was an often requested feature; allowing you to edit the query parameters, headers and contents of a request, and repeat it against the server. This is an extension of the Repeat function added in Charles v2.5. At the moment the editing capability includes headers, query strings, forms and Flash Remoting / AMF. I’m particularly excited about the AMF editing; you can change method parameters and re-execute your AMF request against your server all within Charles.

The Chart view is a graphical representation of the existing Summary tab. It visualises the loading timeline of the resources associated with a page, or all of the resources under a path or on a site. It makes clear the sequence in which resources are loaded, which are loaded in parallel or in series and what’s making your page take so long to load.

The mapping tools help you during the development of website. They primarily exist to help avoid the upload-and-test pattern that we sometimes have to follow. Using Map Local you can now attach a local directory to a URL, and when Charles sees a request for that site it will first check if it has the file locally. This is transparent to your browser so it behaves as if the file was loaded from the remote website as usual. This should be especially useful for people testing CSS, image and SWF changes: you can test your changes as if they were on the live site, before you put them live. Map local can map entire sites, certain paths within sites or even specific file types (eg. *.swf).

The Map tool works like the Map Local tool except it maps one website into another. Because Map Local only works with static files, Map is the other half of the solution. If you’ve got a development server back-end that you’d like to test as if it was on the live site, you can use the Map tool to accomplish that. Mapping like this was already possible using the Rewrite tool, however this makes it easier and quicker to setup.

So, please download the beta and send me feedback - especially bugs and especially any regressions!

Download Charles 3.0 public beta

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 10th, 2007 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Charles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.