The advantage of using a web server in a package like this is that
you don't have to build a custom GUI for your app-- you have a
familiar & ubiquitous GUI: the users web browser of choice.
I think you could prolly put together a package that used PHP with
Jetty instead of BlueDragon, but then you start to get into the
situation where the user has to do some installation-- different
binaries for different platforms.
As Roger mentioned, MySQL is a problem because you can't legally
redistro it unless you also distro source of your app. And, you have
another install (not an easy install for the lay person).
AFAIK, only Java-based components will allow you to create a platform-
independent, pre-installed package.
The procedure for using a package like this is:
1) Download the package, or insert the CD
2) Double-click the package icon
3) -- there is no step 3
An alternate [jazzy] way of distributing your app package is to pre-
install it on an iPod-- the whole system fits nicely on a Shuffle (or
any iPod) and will run very nicely from that environment.
Dick
On Aug 24, 2005, at 3:16 PM, Roger Howard wrote:
On Aug 24, 2005, at 11:57 AM, Graham Anderson wrote:
Is there anything cross-platform out there that can act as a stand
alone web server for CD-ROM delivery ?
Would like to hook up my QT projects to a localhost database that
speaks php/mysql.
On the PC side, you have dwebPro. Wonder if there is a cross
platform equivalent ?
Or, is there an app like dwebPro that has Windows and Mac versions ?
Depending how savvy you are with Apache, MySQL and PHP you could
bundle this yourself - all these components work on both platforms.
You'd have different binaries for each platform though, unlike
Dick's suggestion, and you'd basically be "rolling your own". I'm
not aware of any such prebuilt packages for both OSX and Windows
from a single source.
Certainly all these tools, though, can be sandboxed and run as
components in a large app without having to leave a big mess behind.
That said... why? How about cut out Apache and MySQL for starters,
since both are probably unnecessary for a CD-ROM app (you're not
going to be *writing* any data, just querying... and Apache is only
used as a front-end to PHP). Instead, pick a scripting language
like Python which can provide it's own http server and has SQLite
support. That way you've only got one component (Python, or PHP...
not sure if PHP can host it's own Web server though) to bundle...
no separate Web server to start up, no database server to start up.
SQLite is a nice embeddable SQL database, more suited to CD-ROM.
Python has good XML support, though I'm not trying to push Python
particularly - it just seems more suited to the job than Apache
+MySQL+PHP.
At very least, I'd look at skipping MySQL and using SQLite.
