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Hurl

hurl.r09.railsrumble.com

84 pointsmshafrir31 comments

Thanks for the comments everyone! The main idea here is that you can share Hurl URLs which others can modify and play with.

For example I can give you this URL: http://hurl.me/ufsmb1

And you can change 'json' to 'xml' to see what changes.

Hurl was inspired by sharing curl input and output over pastebins. We should probably make this more clear.

Easter egg: try entering the site's URL.

Very, very cool.. and I love the name.

That said, I regularly test APIs using actual usernames and passwords via HTTP Basic Auth. It will be a cold day in hell before I toss my credentials in cleartext into a web form. :-)

I really like the syntax-highlighted, pretty-printed JSON output, though. Really handy.

We plan to open source Hurl so you can run it somewhere if you want (for auth reasons).

This is what I love to hear (now to get those Twiddlr kids to let me run a local instance...).

A similar app, but as native OS X app (useful for localhost requests) http://ditchnet.org/httpclient/

HTTPClient is great and was a big influence on Hurl (for instance we auto-complete headers just like HTTPClient does).

I can't seem to get Hurl to send application/json content. Any ideas?

A few minutes later: everything seems to give the error:

Cannot allocate memory - fork(2)

Yeah you guys crashed it :P

I'm workin' on bringing it back up.

It's ok, but Firebug covers this pretty well already.

I commented about this further down but the main idea is you can share Hurls which others can modify and play with, e.g. http://hurl.me/ufsmb1

After doing some tests, it appears that gzip doesn't work.

I use http://code.google.com/p/rest-client/. But cool site none-the-less.

Why don't we make something like socket2http_get

    http://example.com/tcp?address=example.com:80&send=GET+/+HTTP/1.1%0D%0AHOST:+example.com%0D%0A%0D%0A

Oh wait... did I just re-invented HTTP 1.1 Connect?

I'll stick with HTTP Client for OS X, handles everything I need it for!

Cool site, but I would lose the fluorescent dots filling each margin.

Very slick, but it really needs a JSON pretty printer in addition to the XML one. Most JSON services just send one huge line, which is exactly how Hurl displays it.

Can you give me an example URL? Sounds like a bug.

We do pretty print JSON: http://hurl.me/ufsmb1

http://hurl.it/hurls/7249f0ef9428c30c52e8e739eace1ba365fa24c...

Ah, I assume you are relying on the MIME type to be application/json, which is far from universal. A heuristic JSON detector shouldn't be hard.

Why no way to enter a raw POST body instead of key-value pairs? Could've been seriously useful for some web services.

Coming soon.

This is seriously news? I could write this app in 10 lines of code, or am I missing something important?

Yes, perhaps you are. First, watch the video: http://vimeo.com/6238577

Second, realize that this was developed from start to finish in 48 hours, by some not untalented people... they seem to have put a lot of thought into it, and the details really show.

Third, saying you could do anything nontrivial in "10 lines of code" reminds me of this guy http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678501

Sorry, making an http request and showing the response in headers qualifies as trivial in most modern programming languages.

First, watch the video?

Doesn't that seem to emphasize the guy's point? It seems like a neat if simplistic little tool and if you have to watch a video to tell how it's something more...

Yeah, it does.

Sounds like we should change this:

  Hurl makes HTTP requests.
  Enter a URL, set some headers, then view the response.
  Perfect for APIs.

To something like this:

  Hurl makes HTTP requests.
  Enter a URL, set some headers, get a response, then share it with others.
  Perfect for demoing and debugging APIs.

Less then 250 lines of code: http://api.drupal.org/api/function/drupal_http_request/7

I think you meant that you can reproduce a fraction of this app's functionality, and present it in an unattractive way with really bad useability, in ten lines of code. And even then you'd be exaggerating.

the ability to link to the responses / output seems like it might be useful for debugging and helping others

Love the unicorn puking a rainbow on their 404 error page.

Thanks! Me too.

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