I am currently using Wireshark whenever I want to debug an application that talk

Question

I am currently using Wireshark whenever I want to debug an application that talks over the network. In general, this works fine but I always feel like Wireshark is an overkill for my demands. When I for example monitor the traffic of a REST application, I first have to filter heavyly in order to find "my" traffic. This always takes a minute or two to set up.

Instead, I would rather specify an IP and a port to monitor and get for example the XML that is sent over this port printed as is in some dialog form.

Recommendations can be for any operating system (Windows, Linux or OS X), at best: all of them as it's not always up to me to decide where an application is deployed.

Is there something that aims towards this demand?

Explanation / Answer

I agree with your feeling about Wireshark: I like it as well but for just monitoring HTTP requests, it is overkill. I had to look up the filtering syntax every time.

For just tcp monitoring, I use as much as possible the built-in Eclipse TCP monitoring which always gave me the results I wanted.

As a separate software, there is also WebScarab from OWASP which is just a proxy but you can trace everything; separately they also have WebGoat, a good tutorial on how to secure your web-application (by trying to hack it using WebScarab)

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