Debugging web apps using tcpdump and Wireshark

Debugging AJAX calls can be a pain, especially when they use POSTs that hide the variable values from view. Normally, I’d just use Firebug, the best web development tool since the browser itself. Unfortunately, calls to my Facebook application are all routed through Facebook’s servers, rendering Firebug useless.

Now, when I run into a sticky AJAX problem, I rely on tcpdump and Wireshark.
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PHP SOAP client giving "Error Fetching http headers"

Summary: PHP’s SOAP client was throwing an extremely unhelpful error: Error Fetching http headers. It turns out that it was a simple case of a slow SOAP server, and increasing the defaultsockettimeout in php.ini to 120 fixed it.
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