I’m a huge fan of the app store model that has sprung up over the past few years, and I Apple’s introduction of the iPhone App Store may have been more influential than the iPhone itself. Part of the reason I like it so much is that I think it is a good business model, but it also brings back memories of my Dad and I making applications and sharing them via CompuServe and AOL message boards when I was in Jr High. It is pretty cool to build something that entertains or helps thousands of people across the world (and make a few bucks to fuel your computer habit in the process!)
Nostalgia aside – I’ve released a new Mac (desktop) app to the Mac App Store called ‘Graphical Http Client’. This is a developer tool aimed at helping developers test and interact with REST-based services. Typically, when experimenting with or testing these services, you’ll use a command-line tool (like curl), access it with your browser (if it is a really simple GET request), or write tests to work with these services. My software aims to make this interaction somewhat easier. Some features include:
– Perform any HTTP method (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc..)
– Ability to set request headers
– Ability to set authentication (Basic or Digest)
– When you perform the request, you’ll see the HTTP status code, how long the request took, the response headers, and the response body
– Nice formatting for requests that return JSON
– Ability to view HTML responses in a web view
– You can save the response body as a file (useful for when it returns binary data like an image)
– You can also save your requests and open them up later to save time
– Plus a bunch of other stuff
You can view it on my website here, or directly on the Mac App Store.
If you do download it, please leave feedback in the App Store and/or at my User Voice site.
This looks like a great resource for developing with web services. Congratulations on getting this released through the app store!
Dude….. this was exactly what I was looking for. Something that would be nice is a hotkey that I can hit that will send the query while I’m editing the request body. Maybe command-r (like sequelpro, just used to jamming on that button) Also a history of urls entered maybe even a way to save some queries so I close things down and come back to it later.
Love the pretty printing of the response data.
This was pretty much everything I was looking for
Thanks!!!
@Jason –
Glad you found it useful! Thanks for the feedback.
1) Hotkey to send the request while in the body
Good idea. I’ll look into this. If you don’t mind, can you add this as a suggestion on the support/feedback site here:
http://support.uresk.net/
That way others can comment on it, vote for it, etc…
2) URL history, ability to save
I’m working on some stuff around a URL history. However, you can already save requests – just save it like you would anything else (CMD+S or via the File menu) and you can open it up later or send it to someone else using the tool.
Requests are saved as .httprequest files and include the URL, headers, and request body. Authentication info isn’t saved for security reasons.
Thanks again for the feedback, I hope the tools continues to be valuable for you!
This looks very cool. Now all I need is a Mac!