Fiddler is a request inspector, form tamperer and general debugging proxy for HTTP. Fiddler enables web developers to monitor HTTP requests to their web application, watch request and response headers, tamper with query strings and form values, collect statistics and even rebuild and send new requests. It has inbuilt HTTPS support using a middle-man approach, and can even decode encoded request bodies, as well as render images, and view HEX values and XML.

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Often you need solid metrics on the performance of your web application. Benchmarking your website can provide insight into which sections of your application might need major optimizations, and helps in dealing with scalability issues. Apache Bench, or ‘ab’, is a command line load testing utility which ships with Apache, and allows you to simulate load on a web server. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to get started with ab.

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Over on the AVNet Labs blog, Ekerete Akpan has posted a few results from his recent framework benchmarks to much controversy. His tests covered a few major PHP frameworks, such as CodeIgniter, CakePHP and Zend Framework, along with baseline results for serving static HTML and procedural PHP versions of the same page. He also covered some basic Ruby on Rails, including Passenger (mod_rails?) and Ruby Enterprise. Here are some of his more interesting findings.

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There aren’t too many free options for charting on the web, either client-side or server-side, that provide you with the actual charting code. We recently reviewed Google Charts, a web-based API for charting from Google. However, either for internal controls, or just simplicity of implementation, sometimes you need to do your own charting with a free software solution. Here are some of the better options, both purely JavaScript/Flash, as well as those with server-side bindings.

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We’ve been looking at what makes a good Web Application design good. We’ll continue that thought with Mint.com the financial account managing software.

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Web applications are the commodity to deal in on the internet these days but what makes them successful isn’t always their function, often times design plays a huge role. Today I’m taking a look at five apps that exemplify various aspects of great Web App design.

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Web applications are a growing trend in cloud computing but what makes the most popular applications, popular? I believe the answer lies in good design.

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One critical factor many new start-ups forget is that half of creating a successful web app is making sure that its well designed and easy to use. In this part of our series we’ll continue looking at well designed web applications….

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Web applications are all the rage these days as cloud computing becomes the standard way of doing things. Whether it’s Facebook apps, Web clients, Flash, Adobe Air Apps or anything else that’s becoming ubiquitous, a huge part of the development of these applications is design and what you an learn from the design of quality web applications is priceless. In this series of posts, I’ll spotlight five well known web applications and share the design aspects that I think make each unique.

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I’ll go out on a limb and say Wordpress is one of the finest software applications to come out this millennium. Its put the power of the press and the ability to reach thousands (or millions) of people in the hands of the people live never before. People from every walks of life can create powerful websites without needing to know a shred of code and it’s all open source. That said, for people who want to dig deeper and learn a little bit more about how to create their own themes, the process can be incredibly daunting. In took me ten posts just to cover the subject a few months back on this post. What Wordpress truly needs is a WYSIWYG editor to really empower people to get creative with their blogs!

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