Recently  I created a small app to show off in a demo. It’s supposed to live on a webserver, and loads an xml file which contains urllinks using an HTTPService, and then assigns these links to buttons in a tabbed navigator flash component that’s located somewhere in the html page.

For the demo, I created a few dummy html pages that are kept in the same directory and pointed the urls in the xml to use those.

The problem I faced was that I didn’t have a handy webserver to store my release build on when I wanted to demo the app – when I started it up using Windows File Explorer, double clicking the bin-release html file, Flash decided to put it in a mixed sandbox security mode: local-with-network, which means that you forfeit local access to other files. And so my app suddenly couldn’t find it’s xml file anymore. And the purpose of the app is to put it up on a website, the local execute was just to demo to app.

[When you run your app inside the FlexBuilder program, by the way, this all works fine without any problems - it's only when you do a release build that you suddenly start to learn about security sandboxes and apps with local or networking rights.]

I didn’t fancy writing a server in Python/CherryPy. Although quite possible,  it would take time, and I wanted a solution right then and there. It needed to be portable, and smallish, and as long as it could serve some static pages with client-executed content in it I would be happy.

Enter Mini-Server, which is completely standalone program, vintage 2006, about 462K, and does the job admirably. If you install PHP and show it where it lives it can even do php pages. It’s made by John Owen, which apparently is a nom de plume for a whole rafter of bitmonkeys who churn out one program after another…

Anyway, the problem is now solved: I start the mini-server, specify the port and root folder (only once, an ini file is saved for the next time), and hit run. I can then show off my demo site with a flash app that is served via http. Once the demo is done, I hit the stop button. It all fits on a usb stick, neat !

Please note that this is a small server for development purposes only. The author notes this as well, and it’s not something  I would stick on the intarnet without extensively testing it’s capabilities/security issues. But it is still a neat program to have on your usb stick when you rapido need a webserver!

Another solution is, on compile-time, using the flex-compiler publish setting to indicate the sandbox you want your application to be in. A user can then trust the flash app and it can then use both local and networking links. See the above Adobe link in the text for more details if you are looking for that solution.

An extract :

we can now start to have a Small Pieces Loosely Joined pattern. It’s really worthwhile to look into what Joi Ito is doing with the Emergent Democracy movement, even if you’re not interested in the themes of emerging democracy. This started because a conversation was going on, and Ito said “I am frustrated. I’m sitting here in Japan, and I know all of these people are having these conversations in real-time with one another. I want to have a group conversation, too. I’ll start a conference call.

“But since conference calls are so lousy on their own, I’m going to bring up a chat window at the same time.” And then, in the first meeting, I think it was Pete Kaminski said “Well, I’ve also opened up a wiki, and here’s the URL.” And he posted it in the chat window. And people can start annotating things. People can start adding bookmarks; here are the lists.

So, suddenly you’ve got this meeting, which is going on in three separate modes at the same time, two in real-time and one annotated. So you can have the conference call going on, and you know how conference calls are. Either one or two people dominate it, or everyone’s like “Oh, can I — no, but –”, everyone interrupting and cutting each other off.

It’s very difficult to coordinate a conference call, because people can’t see one another, which makes it hard to manage the interrupt logic. In Joi’s conference call, the interrupt logic got moved to the chat room. People would type “Hand,” and the moderator of the conference call will then type “You’re speaking next,” in the chat. So the conference call flowed incredibly smoothly.

Meanwhile, in the chat, people are annotating what people are saying. “Oh, that reminds me of So-and-so’s work.” Or “You should look at this URL…you should look at that ISBN number.” In a conference call, to read out a URL, you have to spell it out — “No, no, no, it’s w w w dot net dash…” In a chat window, you get it and you can click on it right there. You can say, in the conference call or the chat: “Go over to the wiki and look at this.”

This is a broadband conference call, but it isn’t a giant thing. It’s just three little pieces of software laid next to each other and held together with a little bit of social glue. This is an incredibly powerful pattern. It’s different from: Let’s take the Lotus juggernaut and add a web front-end.

Found via vowe.net