TinyWeb - because occasionally we all need a webserver
I've been doing a bit more web-coding of late. Despite my Linux pretensions, I typically do the coding on my old Windows XP box (I'm a creature of habit).
A lot of what I've been doing needs to be testing on a webserver. Just viewing the local file in a browser won't work (paths, you know). While I could upload everything to my Linux box with Apache, that's a little time consuming if I'm making a series of minor tweaks. And installing a full blown Windows version of Apache seems like overkill.
For a while I've been using a handy little program called TinyWeb, written by Maxim Masiutin and distributed by RITLabs. The executable is 53K (compare that to, say, Microsoft IIS). Granted it is pretty limited in what it will do and it won't be running your e-commerce site, but if all you want to do is preview some files, it's perfect. This is a command-line only tool, so you will absolutely want to download TinyBox, which is a graphical front end to TinyWeb written by Ralph Becker. TinyBox will allow you to specify the directory where your files are located and set which port TinyWeb is listening on.
Installing both is just a matter of extracting the single program files from the zip download to a directory. Create a short cut to TinyBox and you're off and running. To view files hit http://localhost on your machine and there you go.
I used TinyWeb/TinyBox this weekend while coding and testing the redesign for my Other Site and it was a godsend. I'm also using it to test an iPhone/mobile version of this blog.
Thanks to Maxim Masiutin and Ralph Becker for this great little combo!
A lot of what I've been doing needs to be testing on a webserver. Just viewing the local file in a browser won't work (paths, you know). While I could upload everything to my Linux box with Apache, that's a little time consuming if I'm making a series of minor tweaks. And installing a full blown Windows version of Apache seems like overkill.
For a while I've been using a handy little program called TinyWeb, written by Maxim Masiutin and distributed by RITLabs. The executable is 53K (compare that to, say, Microsoft IIS). Granted it is pretty limited in what it will do and it won't be running your e-commerce site, but if all you want to do is preview some files, it's perfect. This is a command-line only tool, so you will absolutely want to download TinyBox, which is a graphical front end to TinyWeb written by Ralph Becker. TinyBox will allow you to specify the directory where your files are located and set which port TinyWeb is listening on.
Installing both is just a matter of extracting the single program files from the zip download to a directory. Create a short cut to TinyBox and you're off and running. To view files hit http://localhost on your machine and there you go.
I used TinyWeb/TinyBox this weekend while coding and testing the redesign for my Other Site and it was a godsend. I'm also using it to test an iPhone/mobile version of this blog.
Thanks to Maxim Masiutin and Ralph Becker for this great little combo!
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