JAVASCRIPT » Ajax

As the new buzz technology is developing, I realised I had no real evidence that I infact know how to use it. Coupled with the need for an intranet file server application, I decided to make an Ajax version of a Server File Browser.Initial Screen Using the Sarissa ajax library, this handy application only has a page weight of 71kb! Directory listings are limited to 30 files/folders per page, so the ajax requests are quite quick. Additionally, the application has been tested on Firefox and IE 6 only. Please leave me a comment if you have bugs with other browsers.All shared files can be downloaded, and are force saved. Meaning that you can even share your PHP source files, without letting them be compiled first.Application ConfigurationAfter downloading the application, unzip the contents to a directory on your webserver. This application has been designed for a host where the php document root is the root path of the application. So, it cannot work under a sub-directory of a domain or host name. You may want to look into sub-domains if this affects you.The application requires no database (although may do so in future, to log downloads etc). There is only one configuration file, config.inc.php. In this file there are two main settings:File Browsing   1. Shares      Paths to directories on the server. They do not have to exist as a sub-directory of the application, they can exist relatively or absolutely. So long as the web service has permissions to the directory, you can browse it. This is the biggest reason why I had to write my own application. Others on the net simply didn’t allow complete server browsing. You must be careful not to share anything crucial or anything that will compromise server security. Once a directory is shared, all sub-directories will also be shared.   2. Blacklists      You can exclude certain directory names, file names, and even file extensions from being viewed. I was also going to include something about hidden or system files aswell, but I got lazy :)Apache vs Other ServersIncluded in this package is a .htaccess file for Apache servers. It’s main directive is to prevent PHP’s short open tags. If you have an error with the htaccess file (as some servers will not allow php values in them) then you will have to make arrangements to prevent the short open tag in another way. The short open tag will affect the XML documents returned with the Ajax calls.If you’re not using apache, you will still need to turn off the php short open tags in the php.ini file.