Open Source Debugging Tools for Web Apps

This session will survey a wide range of tools across the Web application debugging space, covering the REST, HTML, SOAP, CSS, TCP, Filesystem and JavaScript facets of an app. We'll look at utilities such as tcpdump, curl, Wireshark, JMeter, Firebug, JASH, Poster, SoapUI, Firediff, lsof, fs_usage, iwatch and more.

Open Source is not just a suite of libraries you consume within your application, but now reaches into the space of tools to help you troubleshoot and improve your applications. The price of these tools eliminates barriers to their use and their open source nature allows you to mix and match them into compositions that work well for your application's unique debugging needs.

Performance and load testing tools such as JMeter will expose bottlenecks, threading, and scalability concerns. Tools such as SOAPui and TCPMon allow you to inspect your SOAP and REST calls at the data structure level, and how Firefox Poster lets you test web services right from the browser. And when only a raw look will do, we can always fall back on the venerable TCPDump and Wireshark.

About Matthew McCullough

Matthew McCullough is an energetic 15 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, and co-founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a Denver consultancy. Matthew currently is VP of Training at GitHub.com, author of the Git Master Class series for O'Reilly, speaker at over 30 national and international conferences, author of three of the top 10 DZone RefCards, and President of the Denver Open Source Users Group. His current topics of research center around project automation: build tools (Gradle), distributed version control (Git, GitHub), Continuous Integration (Jenkins, Travis) and Quality Metrics (Sonar). Matthew resides in Denver, Colorado with his beautiful wife and two young daughters, who are active in nearly every outdoor activity Colorado has to offer.

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