Web Ping 0.1

Web Ping is a program for testing your internet connection.

Web Ping is a simple application to test an internet connection to a perticular site. I created this application after my work moved locations and half our network stayed in the old building and the other half moved with us to the new location.

A flaky (significant point) VPN was set up to keep the two connected. Since a couple of the unmoved servers were of interest to me, I keeped checking to see if they were still accessable with the ping command before doing any serious work with them.

A quick and pathetic Google resulted in no other program that meet my needes, so I wrote one.

Insted of doing an actual network ping, Web Ping tests a connection by downloading a web page on a given server. The size of the page and time are stored in memory and the times are graphed. In this way, sites that block network a ping can still be tracked.

Web Ping also keeps track of the largest and smallest download times per session and also tracks the max and min values currently on the graph. Times of interest are graphed in a color which represents if it is a max or a min. (see figure one). The history tab also lists all the max values as they have been recevied.

A running average is also calculated with each download. The files downloaded are not processed or stored in any way. This prevents any security problems that can normaly happen in a web browser enviroment. The only two pecies of information retained about a downloaded file is the size and time.

Usage:

There are two ways to use Web Ping, GUI or CLI mode. The simplest of the two modes is CLI. Web Ping can be started in CLI mode by passing a url to the jar file in a command line interface like this: "java -jar WebPing.jar http://localhost". Web Ping will automaticly start getting statistics on the requested url, printing results to the screnn.

To quite, press q and then then ENTER key. CLI allows the user to Most people will probably want to use the GUI mode which has a history graph and allows the user to start and stop the session.

The best way to run Web Ping is in GUI mode. GUI mode allows the user start and stop the ping process at will and to change the site that is pinged. Users can also see more information about about the history of the pings and view max values and min values easily. There are three tabs on the top of the page, the first is the application, second is the history list, and the last give information about the application.