GAE Static Site Server

I use the usual office tools and am also a big fan of Sparx EA. These can all export content as HTML so in theory you can easily share your content to the world.

However finding a simple and cheap facility to host this content has always been too hard! Even the excellent Squarespace that I use for this portal does not allow a bunch of HTML to be uploaded.

I try and limit the technologies that I use - trying to be productive by using tools that I have some familiarity with - and at the moment I use Google App Engine (GAE) as my cloud compute. I like it as I don't need to think about servers (setting them up, securing, monitoring etc.), just application code (Java - I am old school). Its also either free or cheap (if I ever get a big bill I will have a massive success on my hands!).

So there are other options ... but GAE is the one I use.

Now you can just jar up some html as a simplistic java web app - and host in in GAE - but that is a bit unsatisfactory - each time you change some content you have to re-deploy, and access control is messy. Just a bit too dirty for me - so instead I spent (wasted?) a few evenings hacking a little app together - the Static Site Server.

Basically I want to be able to zip up a website, uploaded it, do some domain mapping, manage access (public or names users), and keep projects separate - different sites mapped to different domains. 

So here it is in action - click on the image to see it hosting its own UML model.

I have open sourced it and will place the code on GitHub (work in progress - contact me if you are interested, to help with it or just use it).