Embedding a mini webserver with AIR applications

Question

After failing to find a solution to the problem I mentioned
here:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?forumid=75&catid=697&threadid =1392396&highlight_key=y&keyword1=jpeg
and in several other threads,,
I started looking for ways to use external libraries,, and
possibly
the GD Library.
Is it possible to embed a mini web server with Adobe Air
applications
(along with the GD library) ?? Has anybody succeeded in
achieving
similar tasks ??

Answer 1

No there isn't a good way to do this from AIR. The biggest
problem is that you couldn't start up the server from AIR, so a
user would always need to start the server, then start your AIR
app.
You could use Pixel Bender to solve your image resizing
quality problem. Pixel Bender is available in the Flash 10 beta
now, and should be available in the next release of AIR. (See
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Pixel_Bender_Toolkit.)
Note that your image quality problem is not with the JPEG encoder,
it is the resize operation. Since bitmap smoothing is not working
for some reason, you get nearest neighbor sampling -- which
produces the artifacts that you see in your images. Using Pixel
Bender you could code your own resize filter that uses bilinear or
even bicubic sampling.