Bazaarvoice’s Small Web App Technologies (SWAT) team is pleased to announce that we are open sourcing swat-proxy – a tool to inject applications onto third-party webpages.

In third-party web application development it is difficult to be certain how our applications will look and behave on a client’s webpage until they are implemented. Any number of things could interfere – including other third-party applications! Delivering applications that don’t work can obviously have a severe negative impact on both our clients and us.

One solution is to inject – or proxy – our applications onto the client’s web page. This way we can ensure they work correctly – before they go into production. I wrote swat-proxy to do exactly that, acting as a man-in-the-middle between browser and web server. As the browser requests web pages from the server, swat-proxy intercepts the response and proxies our application into it. The browser renders the web page as if it contained our application all along – exactly simulating the client having implemented it. Now we can be certain how our applications will look and behave.

Other tools exist to accomplish this task, but none are as front-end developer-friendly as swat-proxy: it is written entirely in Javascript – plugging in nicely to our existing workflows – and uses familiar CSS selectors to target DOM elements when injecting content. It is run locally using NodeJS and is very easy to use.

We have found swat-proxy to be incredibly useful when rapidly iterating on prototypes and ensuring the behavior of our applications before they are released to production – we hope you do too! We are releasing it to the larger world as open source, under the Apache 2.0 license. Please download it, try it out, and let us know what you think (in comments below, or as issues or pull requests on Github).