Changes

Integration of web applications with the desktop is a very useful (and popular) thing to do. Gears, AIR, Prism, HTML 5 and various combinations between them extend the browser with: persistent storage, accessing files, desktop icons, running in a separate window/process, programmatic drawing, etc.<br /><br />

Integration of web applications with the desktop is a very useful (and popular) thing to do. Gears, AIR, Prism, HTML 5 and various combinations between them extend the browser with: persistent storage, accessing files, desktop icons, running in a separate window/process, programmatic drawing, etc.<br /><br />

There are two main strategies for implementing this:

There are two main strategies for implementing this:

# Running a standard browser, as light as possible, that points to a local BaseHTTPServer. It would use AJAX or a wrapper on top of that (like jsonrpc) to provide the bridge to python. Also, as much functionality as possible should be on the html+js side, to keep the toolkit easily hackable by web developers. The biggest downside is that this process could not be automated (at least not in a nice way). Some python code would have to be written.

# Running a standard browser, as light as possible, that points to a small local webserver. It would use AJAX or a wrapper on top of that (like jsonrpc) to provide the bridge to python. The biggest downside would be that web developers would have a hard time hacking the toolkit itself. Another problem would be that this process could not easily be automated. Some python code would have to be written for any semi-interesting application.

# In a small controller application, embed a browser runtime (with hulahop) that has Gears. The resulting activity would be completely standalone and would not depend on a web server anymore. Gears would have to be installed as a plugin for xulrunner. Javascript dbus access through pyxpcom or [http://sandbox.movial.com/wiki/index.php/Browser_DBus_Bridge#WebKit_.28JavaScriptCore.29_version_notes this].<br />

# In a small controller application, embed a browser runtime (with hulahop). The resulting activity would be completely standalone and would not depend on a web server anymore. Gears would have to be installed as a plugin for xulrunner. Javascript dbus access through pyxpcom or [http://sandbox.movial.com/wiki/index.php/Browser_DBus_Bridge#WebKit_.28JavaScriptCore.29_version_notes this]. It would be very similar to other efforts to bring webapps to the desktop, thus familiar to web developers.<br />A small utility (probably an extension to the Browser activity) will create activities out of websites.<br />

I will be focusing on the second stragety.<br />

I will be focusing on the second stragety.<br />