On-line tools useful in scripting

JSON 2 HTML
With the arrival of Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX and its variation based on JSon (AJAJ) performance testers have to deal with new kind of requests and responses.
Although JSON structure is more lightweight it is harder to read JSON code then it is to read XML.
Code prettifies can make it a bit simpler to understand the structure of JSON object however it is still a bit difficult to read in the plain text form.

While looking for a solution I come across this fantastic JSON to HTML converter tool which is available online at: http://json.bloople.net/


Posix timestamp
Occasionally web application can use timestamps in the web request or response in the POSIX/Unix time format. It is a 10 or 13 digit number which represents number of seconds (for 10 digit number) or milliseconds (for 13 digit number) since 1 January 1970.

Since converting the POSIX time to the form we can understand is probably not an option for anyone here is a link to the online tool which can be of use to everyone. It allows for converting POSIX timestamp to human readable version and vice versa: http://www.epochconverter.com/


XPath test bed
While working with XML documents it is sometimes useful to refer to the individual nodes by their location and attributes. Having to re-run the whole test each time we get the XPath query wrong can be very frustrating. This online allows for uploading XML document and running XPath query against it: http://www.whitebeam.org/library/guide/TechNotes/xpathtestbed.rhtm


URL encode and decode
Any string which is passed to the server in the Query String has to be URL encoded before it can be sent to the server.
In most of the cases it is just a single value or just few words which can be easily read with some basic understanding of URLEncoding structure.

For those more complex cases where a longer value is URLEncoded following online tool can be used. It can encode and decode any string: http://www.albionresearch.com/misc/urlencode.php


Syntax highlighter
This last utility is probably less useful then the others but nevertheless can be handy at a times. As the name suggests syntax highlighter can apply style colours to many types of code making it easier to read http://tohtml.com/jScript/