This is a bit long so please bear with me on it :)

In 2003, I wrote a simple graphical application for Mac OS 9 that could
do HTTP HEAD and GET and show the full HTTP headers and offer minimal
configuration of the request. Since then, it's been updated to do basic
POST (args, but not files), to support Windows and Mac OS X, and the
development series supports cookies and Basic authentication.

While open source, it's buggy and broken and written using a horrendous
RAD tool that has probably more bugs and missing features than my own
code. Much time has been spent trying to get it work well in Windows but
given the tools I use, I don't think it ever will.

I've since discovered the likes of wget and cURL, yet a Linux-loving
friend and keyboard-using fanatic prefers my application over wget and
cURL simply because it's graphical.

It was the recent discovery of cURL bindings in PHP that made me realise
that in fact, I could drive cURL from a graphical interface to provide
session and permanent persistence of display and settings, without
having to actually write all the URL access code from scratch. (Even if
it weren't that I'm not a competent programmer, a lack of code re-use is
simply the introduction of bugs that were solved in existing code, and
my HTTP implementation is far from complete or correct. I was also
amazed at just how powerful cURL is.)

So the question in my mind is, if this is such a good idea, why doesn't
it exist? I can't be the only person who finds an HTTP transaction tool
invaluable in debugging servers and server-side scripting, yet prefers
it in a window where one can revisit URLs and tinker with settings
without fighting with the command-line history and less/more and opening
lots of terminal windows to keep track of settings without losing track
of the last results.

I've also learnt about wxWidgets recently, and creating a cross-platform
graphical cURL front-end with wxWidgets and libcurl should be trivial
for anyone who's good at C++, and even marginally possible for me if I
sweated out all my blood until I was dry. But is the impending blood
loss worth it if there's truly no desire for a graphical front end?
Since no others seem to exist (with the exception of Microsoft's packet
adjustment tool, Fiddler, which is a little too dissimilar for me and
definitely not cross-platform), I wonder if the idea is just totally
undesirable?

What does anyone think? I assume that the odds of anyone *else* writing
it are zero since it would have happened by now otherwise!
Received on 2007-01-08