I’m looking to build a dynamic website without bringing much extra server-side code/apps into the picture, and need some persistent & dynamic information that would be stored, displayed, edited, & displayed across page loads. I’d like to try some alternatives to using a full-fledged php+database back-end, a database is ideal, but I’d only be using the php for a single script for storing json data, and expect that running the full-fledged php apache mod for that purpose is overkill.
So for example, I want to have:
an html page
–> that loads some message data via javascript (e.g. “Killroy was here.”)
–> Which can be edited by an admin, via js ( “roy was here” )
–> The page can be left, and returned to with a different browser, by a public user
–> and the message would repopulate to the changed state (“roy was here”)
Ideally the json data would be stored either on a free external service (amazon ec2 or something? google app engine? I have no idea what might be available for this purpose), or the app & database for storing the data server side would be simple and have quick setup.
So what ways are there to acheive those goals?
Have a look at node.js, maybe that’s what you’re looking for. In short words it’s an event driven I/O framework using JavaScript on the server.
Addition:
CouchDB is a document-oriented database with a RESTful JSON API that can be accessed by simple HTTP-requests. That sounds a bit like what you are seeking, but still has server side implementation.