Python + Prism == Your own Rich Internet Architecture?

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So what happened is, we needed to build this application at work and it fell upon me to do it. For various reasons, I decided to write the app in a web client/server style where I wrote the app in python/web.py and a regular browser was used to access it. In other words, your fairly standard web app.

Eventually, it was decided that this model wasn’t very convenient from an end-user point of view. The need to setup a separate web server (or integrate with an existing server) just to serve the app was a bit too much of a hassle. Plus, all of Firefox’s chrome made this app not feel like an app! So what’s a guy to do?

I decided to use webpy’s baked in server to host the app and Mozilla’s Prism as a client for the app. With the following bit of logic, both the client and server can be invoked from the same piece of code.

#!/usr/bin/env python

# File: ria.py
# Author: Deepak Sarda

import subprocess
import thread
import web

def launch_browser(*args):
    try:
        # Assuming you already have a Prism webapp profile mapped to http://localhost:8080/
        retcode = subprocess.call(['prism', '-webapp', 'helloworld@antrix.net.prism.app'])
    except:
        print 'Failed to create client interface'
    print 'Client exited. We can exit too!'
    thread.interrupt_main()

class App:
    def GET(self):
        print """<html><head><title>Hello World!</title></head>
        <body><h2>Hello World!</h2><p>If you can read this, 
        then you have just created your very own RIA!</p></body></html>"""

if __name__ == '__main__':
    thread.start_new_thread(launch_browser, ())
    web.run(('/', 'App'), globals())

Create a shortcut to ria.py and you have your own RIA solution! For bonus points, process all of the python code, web.py, database modules and what not with bb-freeze and you have a zero-install - just unzip and run - RIA!

☙