view php output without web server?

The_Walrus

anyway i can view what my script would display without installing a web server? I like to edit my php's at work, but then i always have to wait till i get home to even see if they are working. I am pretty limited to applications. I would like to just be able to open some simple program that would basically display it and do nothing else?

Alex_B

You can download php server from this site.
http://firepages.com.au/
It is self install.
Also it gives mysql together with php server.

The_Walrus

im not trying to setup a server or anything, and I am trying to avoid installing anything at all. I would just like to be able to view the php i have written as it would display in a web browser, so i could edit them and see if my revisions are effective, etc.

jpmoriarty

...but to get it as it would appear you've got to send it through a server - it's the server that executes the code you see, without it all you get is code. The server turns it into HTML...

It's a bit like saying "I want to fill my car up with petrol, but I dont want to put any petrol in the car"!

The_Walrus

i would use an outside application, just dont want to install php server, a program similar to some html editors, where you can preview your html without having to run ie or netscape, i just thought there might be something for that. There's also the same type of apps for javascript, most of these are way too much for what i was looking for, but if it cant be done, it cant be done. I think it should be done, or maybe a website where you paste your code into and it parses for you, would be nice, probably pretty risky though. 🙂

jerdo

Previewer's don't happen with server side languages. Think of it as writing a C program and wanting to see what it does without compiliing it, it doesn't work. A server side language is like C except it gets compiled at run time.

stolzyboy

except it technically doesn't get compiled, php, perl, and asp are all INTERPRETED languages, which means they are all interpreted by the server with which they reside, not trying to be smug jerdo, but thougth i'd clear up any confusion between compiled and interpreted languages for the newbies

Jedi_Legend

Couldn't you download the CGI version of PHP and then run it at the command line?

stolzyboy

you'd still have to install it as a cgi module for apache, and he said he doensn't want to install anything

coditoergosum

You could take the cgi version, php.exe, and run it through a command prompt, then copy/paste the output into an html file and open it up in IE to see what it looks like.

Sounds like a royal pain in the ass to me though... why not just setup ftp on your server so you can upload your scripts to your server and actually run them for real?

If you are interested in running php from the command prompt there was a pretty informative article posted here on phpbuilder.com somewhere talking all about it.

The_Walrus

basically i like to work on these at my computer at work, however, they dont want us to install any applications really, I was using remote desktop to run them on my pc at home, but they basically said they dont want me to use that either. So I was just kind of trying to find a way to preview them so I could make minor changes. Thanks for making it more clear why this won't work.