Using the TCP/IP Monitor in Eclipse 3.3

The tcp/ip monitor in Eclipse 3.3 is quite useful. I'm going to give a use case scenario, where the monitor made adapting my app connecting to another a snap.

I love FCKEditor for doing wysiwyg type HTML stuff. It's got a built-in file browser, for browsing, um, files.

I wanted to connect an fckeditor instance's file browser to my subversion repository service.

The nice thing is that the default fck file browser just issues requests for XML. There are actually examples of what it sends, and expects to get back, on the fckeditor site, but I love real world, variable testing, so figured, hey, lets just see what goes back and forth.

To do that, I utilized the quite nifty TCP/IP monitor, found in Eclipse 3.3 with, I think, the Server Tools plugin. If someone knows where it comes from, holler. For me, it's under Window > Show View > Debug > TCP/IP Monitor.

Right-clicking on the view and choosing "properties" (or going thru Window > Preferences > Run/Debug > TCP/IP Monitor) will let you define a new monitor.

It will ask for the local port, meaning, which port to you want to debug through. I choose 81, and for host, I enter localhost, since I've got FCKEditor running on local site. For port, I use 80, since that's the port my local apache install is listening on.

If I save this monitor, and then start it, I've got a proxy right within eclipse, that I can use to view all the traffic between my web browser, and my application.

So, I point my browser at http://localhost:81/, fire up a page that has an fckeditor instance on it, click the "browse server" button, and get a nice, live overview of requests and responses. I can even wank around with the requests and whatnot. Sweet!

Now I can create my cfsvn repository file browser connector, by responding to fckeditor's filebrowser with the XML it expects.

I used this same technique to create an interface to my issue tracking application for eclipse's mylyn, for trac's xmlrpc task repository connector.

I can now view the tasks in my issue application within eclipse, and use the rich task editor and whatnot- including mylyn contexts! And since I had a cf based svn browser, I have the auto-link to the source code from within task descriptions working y todo.

I'll have to write up another post about using the TCP/IP Monitor and the TPTP http request recording/playback stuff to run nifty tests and whatnot.