in-client web server

[lanwrangler at gmail.com]

I've done something reasonably similar using CherryPy as the
webserver.  The main application I wrote stored data in a sqlite3
database.  A separate thread then ran the CherryPy server process.
Each web browser call is mapped (by CherryPy) to a class method which
dealt with connecting to the sqlite3 database, collecting the
appropriate data and then generating the page.  You can have much
tighter integration between the webserver and the application if
required.  I found cherrytemplate to be a usable and lightweight HTML
page templating system that was appropriate for what I wanted but
there are lots of others.

I haven't gone down the full AJAX/DHTML line with CherryPy but from
what I've seen of it, it seems quite capable of delivering.  Neither
have I come across any issues with firewalls or proxy configurations -
I just set CherryPy to bind to 127.0.0.1 at a suitably high port
number and it's always worked so far.

  Matthew.