Web Application Debugging Tools

A Talk by Matthew McCullogh


Some tools he talked about and demonstrated

1. tcpdump
      Captures tcp-ip packets during traffic
      Available as an open source project at http://www.tcpdump.org/
      Allows you to save the captured packet information into a file on disk, thereby allowing offline analysis.

tcpdump -i en1 -s0 -n -A

2. WireShark - visual interpretation of tcpdump captured data
       Once you capture packet information using tcpdump, you can get a better view of it, more readable using this tool. Again an open source project, available from http://www.wireshark.org/

3. netstat
      An all time *nix flavors favourite. Every system admin's first choice. Allows port information.
      Available by defautl with almost all port of all OSs. Sometimes differences are found in implementations pertaining to syntaxes, or switch names/usage.

4. curl  - Another all time favorite.
      1. Allows calling/initiating the http request from command line, saves a lot of time since no program or skeleton is needed to be created for testing http calls.

5. jMeter - designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance

6.  soapUI => mocking a server.
       Available from http://www.soapui.org/

7. JavaScript
      FireBug -  for firefox - Javascript functions/elements are easily visible and manageable. Debugging on the fly is allowed too.  Available as an addon for firefox.
      FireBug - Firebug implementation for Safari.

8. FireFinder- find item in DOM. Easily allow an item in the DOM of a given web page.

More details coming on the following -

9.  Visual Event

10. FireFocus

11. JASH - CLI for test javascript


buzzwords
- bpf - berkeley packet filter