I've been struck by the huge push lately for 'html5 apps' as a (partly) cross-platform approach to mobile and desktop development. Now win8 is integrating html5+js heafily into the desktop and the Mozilla app project is pushing in a similar direction. In many ways I think it makes sense (I find css, for all its shortcomings, a lot nicer to deal with than qt or gtk). But where does it leave a framework like web2py? It seems to me that part of the html5 push comes from developers' reluctance to learn a server-side language well (even php). If we have jquery and indexed local storage in the browser, then people can do a lot with simple tools. I think this is a mirage in many ways. At the same time, I would like to think that I could benefit from the strengths of web2py (and python in general) and still, say, develop an app for Mozilla's upcoming app store. Has anyone been thinking about this? Is there room in things like the win8 api or the Mozilla app api to use web2py? If not, how difficult would it be to create bindings and an api to be included in gluon? Could the DAL be extended to work with browser-based local storage? Or should we see web2py as a traditional server-client framework only?
Ian
