Pragmatic Jim

Recently (and the reason for me not having time to post!), I’ve had to put together a prototype for a system that we need to develop here at work. The idea is to provide a search engine on a CD-ROM (that could possibly work on the web) for documents/executables. Well, that’s the high level spec anyway.

So, the first thing I did was decide that the prototype would be best done using plain old web pages – with a bit of Javascript thrown in for ‘interactivity’. I tired of that quite soon, I knew I needed something like PHP/JSP to get things going properly. That version of the prototype was going nowhere fast without a lot of hacky Javascript.

So, the dilemma – how can I produce something on a CD, that would really need a server to run on. I searched various options, but without doubt the best option was Discstarter from Mirabyte (see http://www.mirabyte.com/en/products/discstarter.html).
Straight away, we found that we could use this product in our normal product CDs that we release. It provides it’s own internal browser, so there’s no need to worry about Internet Explorer/Firefox/Opera. Download it, take a look at the demo – it does some cool stuff.

Next, to provide proper PHP support – so far I had only solved the issue of browser independence. To do this, you can download the Server2Go extension. That’ll give you an Apache server, a MYSQL database and full PHP 5 support. It’s brilliant.
I’m much more of a Java man, but PHP isn’t miles away. In order to provide a quick prototype for this type of application, Discstarter is perfect.

I’m interested to see who else has used this product – either for full releases, or for prototyping. It’s run so well for me that I’ve decided to continue using it, and this will go beyond just prototyping.

Another question I have, is there anyone out there interested in extending this for JSP/Servlet support?