If I develop a website in BootCamp under something like http://localhost:3458 can I browse that web site from within OS X?
I was thinking maybe using Parallels/Virtual Box to point to the BootCamp partition and get it running and then from within Safari somehow point to that virtual machine's localhost.
This would be good so websites could be developed in Windows/Bootcamp and then viewed from OS X to see if they render ok.
Would be also good to run up another virtual machine to look at the virtual machine with the web server on it eg/a Linux VM looking at the Windows VM to see how the website looks in Firefox etc
Can any of this be done?
Best Answer
You won't be able to browse the website on the Windows BootCamp - as Windows wont' be running while Mac OS X is. You possibly could browse to the bootcamp file system via safari, but the webserver wouldn't be running, so that may not be valid testing if your site is anything more than static files.
You could as you suggest used Parallels/Virtual Box or VMware Fusion to run the Bootcamp Windows instance while the Mac is running - one issue with this though is that if you switch between running Windows as a VM (under one of those products within Mac OS X) and between it running natively via bootcamp (i.e. Mac OS is shutdown, but windows is running) then you may have to keep reactivating windows, as it considers the hardware to be different when you boot it under the alternative method.
Whether or not testing from a Linux machine is important or not, would be up to you. Linux browsers would be a pretty low statistic for most websites. You could easily run Firefox in both Windows and Mac to do your testing - personally, I'd feel also doing it under Linux might be overkill.