Idea for a useful tool for a web Entrepreneur/Developer
This is the scenario I was thinking about: I want to interact with a graphic designer remotely, who is very very good with Photoshop and HTML/CSS but who might have trouble setting up the Linux environment needed to run my web app. What I would like to build (or find if it already exists) is a custom CD that when inserted into a Windows or Mac OSX box does the following:
- Start a virtualbox/vmware instance with my Linux distribution of choice.
- Inside the virtual machine the web app is started automatically in debug mode.
- Proper networking is in place so that the web app is accessible to the host operating system on a specified port.
- The template/media folder of my web app is shared via SMB with the host OS.
This way the graphic designer could work on the templates/design of the application having (almost) zero knowledge of the technology behind and no access to the code. I have already developed a solution like this for myself using colinux. But the process required quite some fiddling and was all but automatic. :D Automated is the keyword. That’s it.
21 November 2008