Charles 3.2 public beta
The next major release of Charles is at a stage where I’d like more people to have a go using it, send feedback and find bugs before I roll it out properly. Charles 3.2 has been in development for the last six months in parallel with the maintenance of 3.1; it includes a number of major new features, redesign of existing features and new built-in help text.
The biggest new feature is Breakpoints, accessible from the reorganised Proxy menu (several things have moved there from the Tools menu). Breakpoints let you intercept and edit a request or response before they are passed on.
All of the tools have received a UI overhaul to make configuring and using them easier. Editing is now done in a pop up dialog rather than inline in the table view, and the location matching has been broken out into its constituent parts and documented in much more detail. You can also now enable each row in a tool separately so you can manage a few different configurations.
Charles saved sessions now have a new suffix .chls and can now be double-clicked to open Charles on Windows and Mac OS X. This makes them much more useful of course. Charles can also now open raw AMF dumps with suffixes .amf, .amf0 and .amf3 for those of you developing with AMF.
In December Adobe released the AMF3 specification. It was great to see that the community’s reverse engineering efforts had hit the nail on the head pretty much everywhere. With the specification they also released the BlazeDS reference implementation (soon to be open source). Charles 3.2 now supports BlazeDS so you can debug your BlazeDS applications! Previously versions of Charles couldn’t parse some of the AMF3 used by BlazeDS.
There are a few other changes and additions hidden in there as well. I have been using Charles 3.2 continuously throughout its development so I’m confident that it works well enough to release as a public beta! Please download and try it out and let me know how you get on, even if that’s just “works fine”.
Download the latest beta from http://xk72.com/charles/beta.php
Thanks!
Karl
January 22nd, 2008 at 1:40 am
Strange thing. The About… (OSX) popup looses its charle’s picture after a second ?!
January 24th, 2008 at 5:31 am
Great work Karl. I’m proud to be a Charles user
I will try to help as much as I can!
January 24th, 2008 at 11:02 am
Awesome Karl!
Can the beta be installed alongside an existing 3.1 version? Or will problems arise from trying that?
January 24th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Very good question, it will install on top of the 3.1 version but you can’t have them both installed at the same time. I am quite confident that you won’t want to roll back to 3.1 and I’ll endeavour to fix any regressions as fast as possible! But you could always reinstall 3.1.4 if you did encounter problems.
January 24th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
@erixtekila Thanks for that, I have found and fixed the bug and it will be in the next release of the public beta in the next few days.
January 28th, 2008 at 1:48 am
Brilliant tool! simply brilliant!
January 29th, 2008 at 3:59 am
Hi Karl,
Any way you could add case sensitive to the proxy, would be really useful to have a local copy of a site on a windows machine or on a windows server and then test it using charles and have it fail on case sensitivity issues.
We often have to move content from windows to Unix and would save an enormous amount of time if supported.
Thank you.
February 2nd, 2008 at 3:31 am
Hi,
I tried adding/modifying AMF headers, and it seems to be impossible. Am I missing something, or is it impossible to add new AMF message headers?
http://osflash.org/documentation/amf/envelopes/remoting (see AMF headers)
Cheers,
-Ory
February 2nd, 2008 at 10:50 am
Does Charles record uploaded information as well?
February 4th, 2008 at 8:09 am
@Tommy Yes, it does.
February 4th, 2008 at 8:15 am
@Alan Absolutely that is a very good idea and should work like that by default probably! I will add that into the 3.2 release shortly.
February 4th, 2008 at 8:20 am
@Ory I haven’t encountered many occurences of AMF headers; I’ll email you and we’ll get it working
February 13th, 2008 at 10:43 am
Hi Karl,
great work !!! I use your beta version every day for over tree weeks now, without any bug.
Thank you
March 12th, 2008 at 7:06 am
Hi Karl,
Any chance to get a Firefox 3 extension working soon ?
Great work anyhow !
March 13th, 2008 at 9:33 am
works for me now on FF3b4 thanks !
March 13th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
Hi Karl,
I haven’t looked through the new features yet, but I think it will be great if you can add a “one instance only”-solution for it. When the new feature came to minimize to the system tray, I started starting the application even when it was running. Doing so resulted in an error, and when I shut down the last opened application, it automatically unregisters the other (working) charles instance. The result of this was to shut down all instances of charles, and then start it again.
Best Regards,
Kalle Ravn
March 14th, 2008 at 7:41 am
@kalle Thanks for your comment. Yes! I’m pleased to say that single-instance is in and working in my current build! So no more of those pesky problems. I am making a few other last minute changes this weekend and then I’ll be uploading a new beta and possibly a release shortly thereafter. It’s been too long
March 20th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
See there’s a new beta out. Are you able to give a rundown of some of the changes between beta versions?
March 24th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
@Graeme Sorry about that, a quick release. It’s not release version 3.2 and there’s a version history on the download page. The last changes were some win32 bits and pieces like single-instance support and some fixes to the DDE implementation.
August 13th, 2008 at 6:13 am
know charles ll be is a great tool better than proxomitron and helpfull when debug and apply PRIVACY setting .
I like block some google url like
http://www.google-analytics.com
sb.google.com
suggestqueries.google.com
partner.googleadservices.com
ad.fr.doubleclick.net
September 16th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
It would be really helpful if I could run Charles to intercept localhost websites during the development stage of a page. Is this possible?