One of the tricky things about having flash or ajax client applications that request data on their own is knowing what they are requesting and when. I went nuts today trying to figure out if my ajax was making the right calls and getting back data, 404 messages, or nothing at all. That was until i remembered Squid.

Squid is a simple proxy server used in the unix world for logging or filtering web content but it can be very handy as a desktop tool for debugging rich internet applications.


Looking around, I found this great installer and GUI front end for Squid for OSX called SquidMan.

When you first launch SquidMan it will prompt you to install the Squid subsystem, just click OK enter your password and it will bring up the settings:

You can leave all of the settings as the default

Then from the main dialog, click “Start Squid”

In firefox, find the network settings under the Advanced tab:

Enter your local computer 127.0.0.1 as the proxy host:

This will now force all of your Firefox traffic to go through the squid proxy. From the main SquidMan application settings, you can now choose “Tools” and see a log of every URL that is requested by javascript or flash within your browser: