Recently someone told me this great and simple trick on how to run an HTTP web server with just one command line. This is useful for a million things, but I use it for prototyping and avoid same-origin policy in Chrome. Sure, I know there’s a way to disable it, but you may not want to do that.

XMLHttpRequest cannot load file:///C:/Projects/Test/app/views/shell.html. Cross origin requests are only supported for HTTP.

This is all it takes:

$ cd /projects/TestProject
$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 1234

Then you can access your files at localhost:1234.

I think this provides a much real environment while you build your HTML/JS. That way, you can have a more accurate preview on how your UI is going to feel when served through the Internet by a real server.

Note: This can also be achieved using PHP and probably a gazillion other programming languages.