Question

Here is my problem:

Customer wants my current web application as a Desktop, possibly Executable but without browser for the Client part.

I looked into 3 of following :

• Qooxdoo – Needs browser
• Adobe Air – Needs plugin and Runtime
• Appcelerator – Most interesting , builds into Native Client

Here are the main questions:

Client side:
What i have read on appcelerator is it builds things written in html and javascript
into native executable, so what i have already written (HTML + Jquery + Jquery UI + CSS) can be built into Native Windows / Linux / IOS executables without changes to current code ?

Server side:

No problem as it returms html and json and decided to keep running on server. But wondering how offline contents work.

Answer 1

I’m not sure this will actually work. From what I understand, titanium appcelerator provides a framework primarily for you to create applications on the iOS and Android platforms. I did see some things about the Desktop apps, but nothing about the application being automagically created from the source when your backend code is python (and web2py to boot).

I think it might be impossible to just drop your web2py app in and get a final product. For one, how will Appcelerator know that a given URL corresponds to a given controller and function? How will it perform searches on objects in your database? Do you expect it to read the DAL(...) connection string and just connect?

If you don’t do ANY server-side processing, and don’t use ANY datasources except for JSON, then maybe this would work. Maybe. But I highly doubt it will be automatic, or even all that easy.

It seems to me that you would have to hit every page and save the pages as html to a disc, and then drop the outputted HTML/CSS/JS markup into Titanium. But that means that if you ARE processing forms or searches, or doing anything interesting in the controllers, the titanium application will not have anything to process the server-side backend stuff.

That being said, titanium does work with php code, but not perfectly, And I see issues when using frameworks as opposed to raw php.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/funkatron/4011561849/

It didn’t work that great, regardless. Titanium Desktop does still support PHP though, but developing an app with a server-side framework like CI is basically not going to work.

There was also something in the docs about processing python code, but all I saw was that you can place python in the “client” end of the HTML using a script tag as such:

<script type='text/python'>
   # ... python code ? 
</script>

(ref: http://developer.appcelerator.com/doc/desktop/python )

But that’s not going to help with a web2py app.

IN SHORT — I advise you download the app and create a hello world project. Then follow a tutorial on migrating or converting your application to Titanium. You’ll probably have to rework a lot of things, and I’m not sure how you’d get the execution environment required for web2py, so you might have to rework some of the basic GLUON code which web2py is built on.

Sorry 🙁

You can, however, probably find a way to create a Java application that includes a copy of (a) rocket webserver, (b) python 2.5 or greater interpreter (c) web2py framework, (d) web2py application and package all this in such a way that it runs inside your java application (which will run on any platform) and shows an HTML view to the enduser. Then you could maintain it as a web2py app and just copy the app to your java bundle. I’m not sure if that’s any easier in the end, but it looks like you’ll either have to port to Titanium or Wrap with Java (or another language suitable platform-agnostic language).