Capturing the HTTP Request from a Browser

SOAP Web Service Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Java Socket and HttpURLConnection for SOAP

∟Capturing the HTTP Request from a Browser

This section provides a tutorial example on how to capture the HTTP request generated from a Web browser like Firefox with the socket server test program.

To verify my socket server side testing program, I need to prepare some response files.

My first response file, http_1_0_server.res, represents a simple HTTP 1.0 Web page response:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: SocketHttpServer.java
Content-Length: 50
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8

<html><body>
<p>Hello world!</p>
</body></html>

Now I can run my test server as:

herong> java SocketRequestResponseServer http_1_0_server.res server.req
    
Listening at 8888

With the server running and waiting for connection, I tested it with Chrome with this URL: http://localhost:8888/anything. The browser gets the expected message: Hello world!

In the command window where the server is running, I got:

Connection received from /0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1
Request length: 393
Response length: 179

In the server recording file, server.req, I got:

herong> more server.req

GET /anything HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:8888
Connection: keep-alive
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36
   (KHTMLlike Gecko) Chrome/69.0.3497.81 Safari/537.36
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,
   imagepng,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9