About Charles

Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers (which contain the cookies and caching information).

Charles can act as a man-in-the-middle for HTTP/SSL communication, enabling you to debug the content of your HTTPS sessions.

Charles simulates modem speeds by effectively throttling your bandwidth and introducing latency, so that you can experience an entire website as a modem user might (bandwidth simulator).

Charles is especially useful for Adobe Flash developers as you can view the contents of LoadVariables, LoadMovie and XML loads. Charles also has native support for Flash Remoting (AMF0 and AMF3). More about Charles and Flash.

Charles is also useful for XML development in web browsers, such as AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) and XMLHTTP, as it enables you to see the actual XML that is flowing between the client and the server. Charles natively supports JSON, JSON-RPC and SOAP; displaying each in a simplified tree format for easy viewing and debugging.

Charles will autoconfigure your browser's proxy settings on the following browsers:

  • IE (Windows system proxy settings)
  • Firefox
  • Safari (Mac OS X or Windows system proxy settings)

News

For discussion on the latest changes to Charles, please see the developer blog.

17 April 2008 | Charles 3.2.1 released. Minor new features and bug fixes. Download

24 March 2008 | Charles 3.2 released. Major new features. Download Release Notes

21 January 2008 | Charles 3.2 public beta released. Download and more information on my blog.

19 December 2007 | Charles 3.1.4 released. Bug fixes and minor new features.

21 November 2007 | Charles Mozilla Firefox add-on updated for compatibility with Firefox 3.0.

12 November 2007 | Charles 3.1.3 released. Minor bug fixes, minor new features.

  • Chart tab now includes charts for sizes, durations and types
  • Request & Response can now be displayed combined on one split-panel
  • SSL handshake and certificate errors are now displayed in the tree
  • and more...

29 August 2007 | Charles 3.1.2 released. Minor bug fixes.

27 August 2007 | Charles 3.1.1 released. Minor bug fixes.

13 August 2007 | Charles 3.1 released.

22 May 2007 | Charles 3.0.4 released. Fixes SSL bug on Java 1.4.

14 May 2007 | Charles 3.0.3 re-released. Fixes launch bug on computers that haven't used Charles before. Download

12 May 2007 | Charles 3.0.3 released. Various improvements and minor bug fixes.

23 April 2007 | Charles 3.0.2 released. Minor bug fixes and improvements.

28 March 2007 | Charles 3.0.1 released. Minor bug fixes.

24 March 2007 | Charles 3.0 released. Major new features and improvements:

10 March 2007 | Charles 3.0 public beta released. Release Announcement and Download

For older news please see the news archive.

Links

Basic use of Charles in Flex Design
from Frankie Loscavio

Charles review on flashgroup.net
by Darren Richardson

A great review of Charles from the point of view of Flash developers.

HTTP Introduction and Debugging
by Gordon McKinney

An introduction to HTTP that will help understanding some of the results that you can see in Charles.

Debugging HTTP Sessions
from Kaelin's Radio Weblog

Instructions for setting up Charles on Mac OS X and a review of Charles.

Debugging Flash/Server Interaction with Charles
from uberGeek

Using Charles to find those really annoying Flash bugs in record time.