Limiting access to a local web application

[akho]

This is not strictly Perl related (possibly, not Perl-related at all), but maybe some wise monk can help me.

I have a small personal project — a Web application that should be run locally by the user. That probably makes it a desktop application, but the interface is through a browser (it kinda makes sense to represent this application as an interactive document). So I run a web server on a port with a large number.

The problem is that any user on the same computer accesses the same instance of the application, which is not good. I can ask the user for his login/password, of course, but I feel silly if I have to enter a password for a website that is actually on the same computer — it doesn't feel like a desktop application at all.

So: I need to have an application that is accessible through a web browser, but does not require authentication, while providing different content to different users. How can I do that? I currently use CGI::Application, but the Web part is not that big, so I'm willing to switch.

(one possible option would be to use fuse and the file:// protocol instead of http; but that's too much trouble)