Re: Browsers as stand-alone UI

[andreychek]

What you're doing made me think of some solutions I'm currently working on. OpenThought is designed to provide a better application interface than the general clunkiness available on the web. It does so by not requiring you to reload the page every time you click a link, through the use of a hidden frame. So, you can dynamically update portions of the screen

It's built on top of OpenPlugin, which, amongst other things, abstracts the browser request cycle. That is, it has plugins with drivers that provide an abstration layer on top of CGI and mod_perl. It's fairly simple to add new drivers.

I thought it would be pretty neat to run an OpenThought application on my PDA, but I have no interest in running CGI or mod_perl on my little Zaurus. So I'm looking to write a driver that includes it's own skeleton web server (in Perl of course), something just enough to handle receiving headers and parameters, and returning content.

With something like that, I could put an app on my company web server using the mod_perl driver, or I could move the same app to my PDA, simply by changing the driver being used. No code changes required here :-)

Of course, I haven't written that driver yet...:-)

(shameless plug) Anyone who thinks this is a neat idea can find some cool development snapshots on OpenThought.net, or, better yet, message me and I'll give you some even newer stuff (with lots of new and useful goodies :-)

Anyhow, this is an interesting question, I'm curious what other sorts of solutions folks have come up with.

-Eric

[hardburn]

So I'm looking to write a driver that includes it's own skeleton web server (in Perl of course), something just enough to handle receiving headers and parameters, and returning content.

This shouldn't be hard at all, and a lot of the work is already done for you. I wouldn't have it do CGI, but rather model it like mod_perl RequestHandlers (call a method in a Perl package with an object that contains information about the request).