Re: HTTP request simulator

Hi Stan,

I don't know if there exists a http request simulator, but personally I prefer to

open direct server connections (Using Java socket). For example, typing the

url: "htt://www.inrialpes.fr/opera/" in a browser is equivalent to open a direct

connection with the server: "www.inrialpes.fr" using the port 80 and sending

an HTTP request with different headers. 

To visualize the server delivered content, and change the user request (for

example by adding new headers in its HTTP request), I think that the best 

way is to use a proxy. This third part between servers and the user agent can

be easily implemented for your purpose. It will just send the user request to

the corresponding server and the server answer to the client, and display

exchanged requests in its level.

 

To give an example, I past here the content of a browser request (IE 6.0 under

Windows 2000 profesional), after typing the URL: 

"http://opera.inrialpes.fr/people/Tayeb.Lemlouma/Profile.xml"

 

User agent Request (as it's displayed by the proxy):

 

GET http://opera.inrialpes.fr/people/Tayeb.Lemlouma/Profile.xml HTTP/1.0

Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, 

application/x-comet, application/vnd.ms-excel,

application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/msword, */*

Accept-Language: fr

User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0b; Windows NT 5.0;

.NET CLR 1.0.2914)

Host: opera.inrialpes.fr

Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive




Server answer (I give only the HTTP head of the answer):

 

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Date: Tue, 04 Jun 2002 07:11:34 GMT

Server: Apache/1.3.20 (Unix)  (Red-Hat/Linux) mod_ssl/2.8.4

OpenSSL/0.9.6b DAV/1.0.2 PHP/4.0.6 mod_perl/1.24_01

Last-Modified: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 12:19:07 GMT

ETag: "80b2-f71-3c8df23b"

Accept-Ranges: bytes

Content-Length: 3953

Connection: close

Content-Type: text/xml

 

Using a proxy allows also to modify the server answer, for example if the

proxy adapt the content you will have to modify some headers (such as

the Content-Length and Content-Type) and send the new answer to the client.

 

I hope this will help.

 

Tayeb*

       

----------
Tayeb Lemlouma
http://www.inrialpes.fr/opera/people/Tayeb.Lemlouma/index.html
Opera project
National Research Institute in Computer Science and Control (INRIA Rhône-Alpes, France )
Office B213, phone (+33) 04 76 61 52 81, Fax (+33) 04 76 61 52 07.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <Stan@rga.com>
To: <www-mobile@w3.org>
Sent: Friday, May 31, 2002 11:01 PM
Subject: HTTP request simulator


> 
> Is there a HTTP request simulator that lets you choose various
> device/profile settings and hit a URL to see the output?
> 
> Thanks,
> Stan Wiechers
> 
>