As a high school student, I spend about half of the time that I am awake at school. Therefore, if I want to really work on a project, I have to do at least a little coding at school in one of my classes that makes use of computers. Unfortunately, setting up a portable development environment that can run off of my flash drive has been a bit of a trick, and thus far not completely successful. The system administrators don’t take very kindly to students who have knowledge of computers, they seem to believe that we are just smart enough to be a danger and therefore love to set up obnoxious settings that make my life that much more difficult. Despite their arrogance, I manage but it involves a lot of work just to get an environment running each time I want to work. Often the most tedious task is simply copying over my environment to my personal network drive from my flashdrive (as the running of programs directly from flash drives has been disabled). Transferring XAMPP over is a huge hassle, with over 4,000 files it takes at least 10 minutes. Therefore, I think that a little love for the portable web developers is needed.
I propose something like an Eclipse style IDE. The IDE runs a portable web server on the local computer and will test for you at the click of a button. Built in git support is also a must. That alone would save me the copying of Notepad++ Portable, Git Portable, and XAMPP portable. Instead it would be an easy to use and quick to get running. Another issue that would need to be addressed is the unnecessary networking restrictions often put in place by administrators. Currently XAMPP Portable has an issue running on it’s own and requires extensive modification to run. With a little bit of checking the IDE could figure out the required settings for the host computer and run without complaint.
I may attempt to develop this in the future because unfortunately I am far too busy with my senior year to be able to take the time out to do a project of this caliber any time soon. I am certain it would end up unfinished. Also, as I will be graduating and moving on to college next year, my need for this sort of thing will be gone soon. I am sure that I am not the only student out there with this problem however, so I decided it would be a good idea to outline the idea for someone else in the future or if I get really bored in college. No idea if that will happen or not, lots of things are set to change for me in the next 12 months.
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