Back in March, I was experimenting with DOM and XPath stuff in my labs and created a little utility called the DOM Viewer. The DOM Viewer was a very specific utility that was only geared toward grabbing XPath values, and for that it worked like a champ. However, I found myself wanting to dig deeper into HTTP requests - adding POST values, new header fields, authentication, etc.
In the past, if I wanted to experiment with low level HTTP requests, I would code something from scratch using php and cURL and var_dump my way to victory. However, low level HTTP debugging is becoming increasingly important with the addition of so many RESTful APIs on the internet these days, so I decided to develop a new product called The REST Tester.
The REST Tester is a simple utility designed to help web developers debug RESTful API calls. The main purpose is to let web developers see what they're working with before they start cracking into the code. As of right now, you can call resources that return any kind of text data in the body of the response. I've also added support for image MIME types, so if you call a resource that returns binary image data, you should see the image in with the response.
In the works are Cookie values, custom header values, multiple HTTP Authentication methods, multiple HTTP request methods (DELETE, HEAD, etc.), and support for other content types. I also want to add some formatting to structured responses like JSON or XML. This is definitely just the beginning. If you have any suggestions or comments, please email me [at] troyswanson [dot] net.
