Wurl (web curl) is a browser-based HTTP test client that I slapped together earlier this year (2014), partly because it is a useful tool and partly because it gives me a play project to experiment with React, Typescript and F#.
How it works
Wurl describes http requests using the jquery $.ajax syntax. I chose this because most developers are familiar with it and because it is capable of describing a wide variety of request options.
Wurl first attempts to make the request by directly evaluating the request using jquery from the browser. Try this fun example of querying the github API. Often this strategy will fail due to cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) restrictions. Wurl is smart enough to detect CORS errors and fallback to making the request via a proxy, which is not subject to CORS restrictions.
Unfortunately the proxy is not jquery and does not use jquery (it uses HttpClient) so the query must be parsed and translated. Therefore queries that go via the CORS proxy do not implement the full set of $.ajax features.
HTTP basic authentication
Recently I added support for the Authorization header. The options that are honoured now are: url, type (http verb), headers (Authorization only). This means that basic authentication can be used from Wurl for all services, regardless of CORS support.
Here is an example showing a request to the github API that uses basic authentication. It fails, but only because I have removed my password.