Forum OpenACS Q&A: Recommend Off Line WebServer

Posted by MaineBob OConnor on 02/20/02 02:34 PM

I have this project to make a small "website" on a laptop that is not connected to the net and will be used at tradeshows. The customer doesn't want to pay for internet access at the show. In addition to a few simple static webpages which can be served without a "server", The idea is to get name, email and survey info from a browser web <form....

The "Off Line" server on the Win Laptop would need to be able to save form data into an SDF or comma delimited text file that could later be uploaded and copied to the ACS3x/Postgres site... registering the user and storing the survey info. Also it might be nice to look at the data collected in the text file with the browser while still offline and perhaps delete bogus entries.

Any suggestions for an inexpensive, simple windows offline webserver that would perform these functions?

TIA
-Bob

2: Response to Recommend Off Line WebServer (response to 1)

Posted by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini on 02/20/02 02:52 PM

Use openacs in win2K, it works fine and as your applications will be accesed just by one user its ok, then just dump the db and put it at your future openacs website!

3: Response to Recommend Off Line WebServer (response to 1)

Posted by MaineBob OConnor on 02/20/02 03:33 PM

I was hoping to avoid a really large and potentially troublesome install. I've only Installed ACS/PG on Linux. It will be difficult for me to get access to the laptop before the show, but...

Would it be possible to burn a CD with *everything* needed on the cd and ship the cd to my user with a win98 or better laptop and
have the user just click "Run..."?

-Bob

4: Response to Recommend Off Line WebServer (response to 1)

Posted by Pavel Boghita on 02/20/02 07:24 PM

I've installed Openacs in Win2K and it is really very straightforward following instruction here . Also there was a mention in this thread of someone who managed to install Openacs in Win98 following the instructions mentioned above. Once you have the package installed and working on a Win machine, the I know that you should be able to image that machine on a CD and then install that image on any pc (there is a piece of software made by the guys who also make partition magic, I think is called image maker or something like this). At least this is how we customize new pc's at work to be in line with our corporate policy etc.
Good luck with your work.
Bradut

5: Response to Recommend Off Line WebServer (response to 1)

Posted by Rick Cottle on 02/20/02 10:11 PM

There are a couple of free Windows based web servers that are fairly interesting. GoAhead is designed for embedded applications and so is very small and Xitami looks good too.

http://www.xitami.com/
http://www.goahead.com/webserver/webserver.htm

6: Response to Recommend Off Line WebServer (response to 1)

Posted by John Sequeira on 02/22/02 07:52 PM

Bob,

IndigoStar has an apache/mod_perl distribution tailor-made for CD-ROM web demos. I imagine it would work pretty well for tradeshows.

http://www.indigostar.com/microweb.htm

If you want to use OpenACS, go with VMWare. I'm going to be posting a no-install, downloadable OpenACS distribution either today or tomorrow.