gurucoyote / traumtank

The barebones branch of traumtank servers as a proof of concept example for content creation and saving via $.ajax() to a RESTfull server.

Traumtank bare bone proof of concept

The goal of this repo at this stage is to illustrate how to use a local RESTful webserver with browser based editing of text files.

The RESTful server in this case is Mongoose, one of the iimost lightweight webservers out there. It is fully cross-platform and writte in two C files that can be easily compiled and build on most platforms that have a C compiler.

Why do we need a server at all?

The whole point of this project is to illustrate a all-in-browser content creation. The only reason why a (local) server is needed here is the fact that browers do not have write access to the local filesystem... so we could load files, edit them and... well not save our work.

This is where the lightweight mongoose comes in. Its very small and has not extra dependencies (it vompiles from two C files). It is still very powerfull and most importantly it can act as a RESTful server (it does GET, PUT and DELETE, implementiong basic WebDAV features).

Client side

The (very simple) client uses the jQuery $.ajax() features to load and save (text) files from the www folder. The client (rest.html) is kept intentionally minimalistic for this stage for illustration. A lot can (and will) be done to extend this bare concept. See the maim Traumtank branch for that.

Setup and Usage

There are only a few steps to get going.

Start mongose server

Open a command line. (Mac: Terminal.app, Windows: cmd.exe) Navigate to the folder you put the project into, and there into the mongoose subfolder.

Mac/Unix: cd mongose/ ./mongose conf.txt

The mac binary in this repo is actually called mongoose-maci386

Windows cmd.exe cd mongoose
mongoose.exe conf.txt

Visit http://localhost:8080/rest.html in your browser. You will need to login. The default username and password is «admin« and «admin«.

Write some text, and then hit Save. Note the input field for the filename (and path). This is where the file will end up on your local disk.

Note: you CAN NOT go out of your www/ folder. Paths like ../../somefile.txt will simply end up in the top level folder (www/). NOTE Windows (MinGW build) it seems the (mingw) windows build can not correctly create new folders when you save a file via PUT. It returns a server response of 500 (Internal Server Error). It can save files into subfolders just fine as long as the folders already exist.

Credits

• The mongose web server

  Note: this is not the same mongose as the Node.js related one. Names!

• jQuery