Ever see something, some piece of cool, some bit of technology that makes your jaw drop? I had that happen twice this week. First have a look at David Kellogg’s website and his Plain Old Webserver (pow).

Plain Old Webserver (POW)

POW is either a really cool Firefox extension that turns Firefox into a web server or a lightweight xulRunner web server. Either way it serves up web pages using server side javascripting. Sweat! I still have to play with this a bit to get a feel for it because I’ve never used javascript on a server before, but considering this is portable to any system that xulRunner or Firefox will run on, it makes it a very versatile package right out of the box. While the fact that it doesn’t have a php module means I can’t do local development of my website on it (yet), POW does offer sqllite as a database. You can also download some extras for it like a Firefox database management or directory file listing.

You can also use the xulRunner “portably”. I quoted that because, while the POWUSB package includes both Windows and MAC xulrunner versions (no Linux yet either!), it isn’t exactly portable in the way that say, FirefoxPoratable is. In other words, if you run the included xulRunner on Windows, it will still leave files on your local file system. To make this truly portable, you’d need to refrain from leaving footprints on the system you’re using, therefore this really doesn’t qualify as a portableapp quite yet…

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I thought I knew a thing ‘er two about javascript (I taught myself javascript, and after HTML it was the first interpreted language I learned, and so far I’ve had no formal training in with ECMA specific code), then I saw Dean Edwards website. This guy (and his commenters) must live on planet ECMAscript for crying out loud (if you don’t believe me take a stroll through Mr. Edwards’ website and take a look at his projects and comments on his work, just freakin’ fantastic - from a programming point of view). Anyway, what I really geeked out about was his MiniWeb application. MiniWeb

What can I say, other than - freakin’ sweat! Contained in just 14 files is a (partial) javascript based blog, file management (will kind of, read on), and a *nix-like terminal (again, kind of). The reason for all those caveats is this; pretty much the fact that is is a work in progress AND, the fact that nearly the entirety of the system is contained in the one file: miniweb.html. Any new blog posts, files (which can be text or I think some form of executable - through some javascript magic), etc. are all stored in the miniweb.html file.

As I mentioned, it’s a work in progress, so nothing is complete, the terminal, the blog, pretty much everything but file viewing and management is incomplete. At this point I’m still just toying with it, so it pretty much takes on the Arthur C. Clark idiom of being so far beyond my understanding that it appears to be magic. To wield some of this magic Dean appears to use a home grown javascript compressor. Just… wow…

To check out MiniWeb click here. To download it and play with it on your own, click here. When you open up the file or depending on what you click on in what ever browser you’re using, you’ll probably have to get passed some of your browser’s security to fully use the software. In IE I think you need to allow the software to function on the bar that appears at the top of the browser window, in Firefox, depending on what you’re trying to do you may have to allow the script to complete some actions (don’t forget that “remember this decision” checkbox). Too much fun to pass up…

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 10:13 pm and is filed under Firefox, Internet Explorer, Linux, Neatorific, Tip, Web, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.