What pure server side technologies allow html website capture on shared hosting

As far as I know, only PHP can't be used for this.

But since not many providers allow installation of Perl/开发者_开发问答Python/... scripts on shared, I'm wondering whether there is free solution for either

creation of thumbnails or full-size capturing on the fly / on demand and save it to server (since snapshot lets you only to show thumbnails on hover) - service

or

Flex/Flash solution to capture website and PHP to save it (or save it right with flex/flash) - code to run on server

Is it possible?

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To capture how a website looks like, you first need somebody to render it.

Because you are usually optimizing a web site to run on the major browsers, you will want one of them to handle the rendering.

This (opening a browser instance, opening a certain web page, rendering it and dumping a screen shot of the results) is possible - it's how services like browsershots.org work.

It's just not trivial to set up, and requires total freedom in setting up the server (i.e. administrator privileges to install programs, set rights, etc.). It definitely is not possible to do with pure PHP, Perl, Python, or any other scripting language, on a restricted shared hosting environment.

If you're on Windows, the answer to this question may be of help.

For a list of snap shot services, see this question.