Charles v3.3 public beta
Monday, December 29th, 2008Hi all. Happy holidays!
I’ve put the finishing touches on some new features for Charles:
- Validation of Markup (HTML/XHTML), RSS / Atom & CSS
- XML import/export format for recorded sessions
- JSONP support
Validation is a really exciting addition for web developers. If you’re trying to build valid HTML / XHTML pages (and the accompanying CSS and RSS/Atom feeds) then this will be invaluable for checking your work. First record your pages in Charles, then select them and choose Validate from the context-menu or the toolbar; Charles will validate each page, one at a time, using W3C’s validator web services. You can view a simple summary of the results or detailed warnings & errors for each page. Double-click the error message line numbers to view that line in the source. Note that the validation uses the source recorded by Charles, it doesn’t just pass the URL to the validator, so this correctly validates dynamically generated pages where the same page may emit different markup depending upon input or state. I’m very interested to hear feedback on this feature. Credit to Rowan Simpson and Glen Barnes for the idea to integrate validation into Charles.
Charles can now export and import recorded sessions in an XML format. This is useful if you want to analyse the data collected by Charles in your own software. To this end the Auto Save tool now also supports saving in any export format, rather than just the Charles session format. I’m going to be looking at more ways to integrate Charles into automated monitoring environments in the near future.
Finally, JSONP support was a small but irritating omission in Charles’s JSON support that is now fixed!
This is a public beta so I’m hoping for feedback and bug reports on the new features, especially if I’ve introduced any bugs! There have also been a few bug fixes in this release: fixes to the request editing feature, Map Remote with SSL, and using an external SOCKS proxy.
Please leave feedback in the comments or via the contact form on the Charles website.