HTTP Mangler

This is a quick-and-dirty HTTP proxy server which is intended to modify HTML
as it is passed through, to make websites output statistics about their load
times in any browser.

Loose ends abound: in particular, as a proxy server it is very inefficient
(for instance, it does not use thread pooling) and does not gracefully handle
all HTTP or net errors. The code is not exactly beautiful, though it could be
worse. Pages will take a while to load with this proxy server, as it makes
image loading slower.

The metrics are not perfect and they do not tell the whole story, but they are
generic, simple to understand, and cross-browser. Improvements on such metrics
or ideas for new, generic metrics would be extremely welcome.

SETUP

1. java -jar http_mangler.jar --cache
2. Configure your browser to use "localhost" on port 8080 as an HTTP proxy
   (not HTTPS or any other protocol--only HTTP is supported).
3. Browse to the websites you would like to profile.
4. Browse to the same page to see how it behaves with a full cache. Since the
   proxy server is slow, this will give a very different number.
   
CRAZY-CACHING

We only support "crazy-cache", which means, "cache everything." This is not at
all practical for browsing the Web: it will never refresh any pages, and the
cache will eat endless memory. Nevertheless, crazy-caching is very useful for
measuring web page delays: after an initial load, a page may be refreshed as
many times as desired for benchmarking purposes and no Internet delays will
occur (unless the page uses JavaScript to construct random or time-based URL
requests).
   
DEVELOPMENT

To develop, just open this folder as an Eclipse project.

FUTURE

The mangling possibilities are quite endless. Speedups and stabilizations,
coupled with a dynamically-loaded mangler feature, could easily transform this
project into a useful day-to-day HTTP proxy, such as an ad-blocking proxy.