We have a large website running that offers a JsonRpc web service.
For offline demonstration purposes, I want to realize a portable, locally running webserver with a minimalistic feature replication of the live webservice, and bundle this together with Html files which do Ajax requests to it.
This local server executable should have as little dependencies as possible.
It's going to be run and presented by non-devs on non-dev Windows machines, so I would prefer having a simple executable plus the service code. The language would need to be .NET, PHP or Java.
I'll need a small database behind which probably will be Sqlite.
It's important to say that, for reasons I won't get into here, we cannot use the original web service code, but we have to rewrite it new for the local demo server. This is why I want to put minimal effort in the local server tech.
An installer for distribution is not mandatory, it's okay to have a zip file with an executable in it which starts up the local webserver.
What would you recommend realizing these requirements?
Best Answer
Thanks for all your suggestions!
Finally I decided to go with the Mongoose stand-alone webserver which supports all kind of cgi plugins, including PHP. It's easily configurable and deployable and just fits my needs.
On my research I also found the UltiDev Web Server Pro, which was on the short list if I'd decided to go with .NET. Seems to be a nice product, but havn't worked with it yet, maybe it comes in handy for anyone who reads this.
The reason to go with PHP was that it requires a lot smaller footprint than .NET would have needed - in terms of files in the file system. I can put everything I need on the server side into one PHP file, no need for DLLs and other dependencies.
Cheers.