Debug Redirects and HTTP Headers in Firefox with Live HTTP Headers

If you are a web developer, sooner or later, you will have to play (or fight) with HTTP Headers handling.

HTTP Headers, even if hidden in the server-browsers interactions, are a fundamental element of the web.

Also a strong usage of HTTP Headers is done in SEO - Serach engine optimization, where they are used to keep Search Engines Caches updated.

The problem in developing web applications with a strong usage of HTTP Headers funcionalities is that it's really difficult to test, debug or troubleshooting them.

In order to simulate browser-webserver interactions, some just use the plain old telnet or sniff HTTP traffic with tools like wireshark. Anyway those kind of methods are slow and error prone.

A really faster and convenient way of testing is using a Firefox extension called Live HTTP Headers.

Using this tool you will be able to speed up your HTTP Headers developments considerably.

The tool, available under Tool - Live HTTP Header, offers a lot of really cool features:

• full HTTP Headers browser to server and server to browser logging
• Save functionalities: to save your interactions for later troubleshooting or parsing
• Replay: to resend an header to the sever and get it's output
• full POST logging: to get the full contents of your forms data
• Filtering and Excluding requests using regular expressions

This is a really useful tool which you will love without doubt. Happy HTTP Headers hacking.

Live HTTP Headers