Annie DeBrowsa at ActiveState Firefly

I’m writing to announce the availability of my project AnnieDeBrowsa™, in the ActiveState Firefly repositories.

Check it out at Firefly project name AnnieDeBrowsa

AnnieDeBrowsa Winpath™

A sub-component of AnnieDeBrowsa, WinPath offers perhaps the most obvious benefit an AnnieDebrowsa? installation. To access WinPath™, extract AnnieDeBrowsa™ to a directory of your choice (i.e. http://localhost/anniedebrowsa), and click the link to “path2url.phtml”.

Winpath is handy for navigating to a PHP file from a source without a native server-mapping function. Once AnnieDeBrowsa is available on your HTTP server, send a URL directly to your web browser, as in the following example [ see FIG 1 ] Let’s assume there exists a file on your HTTP server which you’d like to preview in your web browser. Perhaps the file is the very beginning of a new project, or a bit of JavaScript? embedded in a PHP-powered document that you whipped up for testing, such that previewing the results requires loading the file in the browser as a proper HTTP URL– but, you have no bookmark or “awesome” assistance.

Such a scenario is not uncommon– and it’s precisely what Winpath was developed to accommodate: observe the portion of the example URL, just after “?winpath=” (a URL-encoded variable assignment). There, information about the location of a system file is passed through HTTP_REQUEST to Winpath, by appending onto the URL itself, the full path to the desired file. The string assigned at ?winpath= is retrieved and processed into an HTTP URL, creating an HTML anchor which opens a window, with your new file loaded as you wanted– in one simple click. Note: Winpath is effective for Linux and Windows system paths (and other paths can be included with only minor tweaking, if you’re PHP savvy).

Why is this different than typing, for example, http:// localhost / path / to file / etc? Because, now you can send Winpath URL’s to your browser from virtually any text editor, from the command-line history, from “start > run” and “run” history, and even Windows Explorer (with minor adjustments in Folder Options), thereby alleviating the annoyance of tedium in repeatedly typing fresh URL’s directly into the browser. Thus, AnnieDeBrowsa™ makes it a cinch to preview new URL’s at any time, from virtually anywhere!

FIG. 1:
http://localhost/AnnieDebrowsa/index.php?winpath=/home/user/public_html/project/index.php

I am relatively new to Subversion (version control, in general), and certainly new to membership in any on-line, communal source version repository management… uh.. thing… , such as “Firefly”.

Being a member of ActiveState Community, i’d like to advise the others to contribute projects to Firefly. Why? Having an existing membership at ActiveState? made it more than easy to get started. I may have had the advantage of understanding Subversion, as I’d been working with it on my testing server for some time, however– I do not believe it would be much more difficult for someone to install Subversion on his or her system, and get involved, as i did– in literally, a matter of minutes– with Firefly.

Firefly is an ActiveState project for hosting multiple projects under the Trac version control system. It is unique in development, and available in both FREE and professional (paid-for) memberships. Check it out!