I’ve written webapps that just print out the HTTP request headers long ago, but usually lately I’ve been working with Apache fronted Tomcat instances where Apache had mod_php installed, so I could just use the php:
<pre><? print_r($_SERVER); ?></pre>
And when I’m trying to see HTTP headers from the client, I can just use Firefox’s LiveHttpHeaders plugin.
However, I wanted to verify that certain headers were actually coming into Tomcat (after going through something that in turn went through Apache to get to Tomcat).
This app is heavily based on sinatra-example: git://github.com/vertis/sinatra-example.git. I mostly used the instructions found here: www.coreguardian.org/2010/02/21/sinatra-on-java/. I was too lazy to setup a Sinatra app from scratch for this, and the file layout and cucumber test in the vertis sinatra-example was clean.
Requires jruby (I used 1.4.0). jruby.org/
In addition I did this to get all the jars needed:
jruby -S gem install sinatra warbler haml cucumber webrat
Optionally you can test with:
jruby -S rake jruby -S rake spec
then to build war with same name as directory use:
jruby -S warble
Deploy the war by copying into webapps directory in Tomcat (assuming you have it configured to automatically deploy).
Then hit that webapp (for example: yourserver/requestinfo/ ) and see the result of request.inspect.