Wow. This is so big, I have to say it again. WOW. Google has released their offline web application api called “Google Gears” that provides both a webserver and a database that you can access via javascript. There is a free, open source browser plugin for IE and Firefox.

Along the same lines, a company called Silverstripe software has documented how they’ve used cx_freeze to create a single exe web application using the python Django framework. They wrote their app in python, used sqlite for the database and the resulting exe included *everything* except the web browser. Double click the exe and open your browser. Even the python interpreter is included. I’ll bet it would be quite painless to have the app launch the default browser for the system to the correct location automatically.