During a recent project of ours we found ourselves in the position where the developer creating the server-side code was a full 5 time zones away. This meant that we often had to do debugging over email. This was, as one would expect, excruciatingly slow. The issues that arose during integration almost always resolved around how we were mapping the servers .Net classes to our AS3 classes - one small change to the server class could break things on our end in a non-obvious way.

Luckily early in this process we discovered a piece of shareware called Charles, a web debugging proxy that’s available for Mac, PC, and Linux. Once you fire Charles up it acts as a proxy for all of your web traffic. This lets you capture, view, and even throttle the data that’s flowing between your machine and the web server. And best of all for us, it lets you view inside of AMF packets and see exactly what’s coming over the wire. Once we got Charles up and working we able to tackle kind of issues that used to take us hours and resolve them in minutes.

We haven’t done a done with Charles yet, but so far our only wish is that we knew about it sooner. Suffice it to say that we found the $50 registration fee to be well worth it!