Yes, I think web2py can already produce a self-contained local app running from the rocket server. At least I think there was a recipe for that in the last edition of the book (I haven't looked in a while).
The issue of web2py being 'thick' for the purpose is very much what I was wondering about. I wonder how easy it would be to take a subset of the gluon package and use it outside a server, on the local machine. I don't know enough about the internals to tell whether this would require massive re-writing or just minor pruning. The subtext of all of this is my ongoing search for the holy grail of a cross-platform framework (which now really means linux, osX, win, android, iOS, BBOS, etc.!) I think that's also what is driving the locally-installed html app push. But I don't think I can stomach going back to js for business logic. Rather than re-invent a whole new framework, it would be much better if an existing python framework could be adapted as a back-end for that kind of application. Ian On Saturday, March 24, 2012 3:09:19 PM UTC-4, pbreit wrote: > > I'm not sure if this is what you meant but I've wondered if Web2py would > make a good framework for being able to distribute a self-contained app to > be run locally. For example, I've seen some point-of-sale systems that > package up a Ruby + Postgres runtime designed to be run locally (I believe > ShopKeep is an example). An app like this could of course sync with a > server in the cloud (would be nice to have some pre-existing code for that). > > But it sounds like you might be referring to something like a Backbone.js > app with browser-based local storage and speaking to a back-end somewhere > in REST. Certainly Web2py or DAL might be a reasonable engine to run the > back-end but it's a little "thick". I saw some examples that run off the > PHP "Slim" framework which is super-lightweight and just spits out > JSON/REST. >
