Can I "embed" a Python back-end in an AIR application?

Question

I'm trying to find out if there is a way I could embed a Python back-end into an AIR application? I'm looking to employ an approach similar to the one outlined here to implement the business logic for my application, but additionally, I would like to provide the user with a single binary which they can load. I don't want the user to have to fire up a seperate server process to make this work. Is this possible in some way or am I out of luck?

Answer 1

Probably. We are using a J2EE server side which uses SOAP webservices to talk to our AIR application on the frontend. You should be able to do the same because soap doesn't care which technology sits on either side of it.

You can always have the application launch from a single binary which first fires up the server, then the client, if both are expected to sit on the users system. Also it gives you flexibility to have a more service oriented model later, if you want to. Without knowing what your app does, it is hard to know if that makes sense or not.

For setting up the python side of SOAP webservices, here's a useful link to a diveintopython article. Then, if you have your server running with the wsdl, FlexBuilder can generate the AIR side of the webservices for you.

Answer 2

You cannot embed your Python server in an AIR application. So basically you are out of luck.

The simplest solution probably is to run a server on a central location that all your users can connect to from their AIR apps. That means that all/most of the data will be on your server, and not on the users computer, I don't know if that is a big issue but I guess it is.

Also depending on your target systems you could create the program you want yourself without (fully) depending on AIR. You can generate executables for windows and osx from Flash CS3/4 or you can use a special (commercial) executable-maker that provides some more functionality. Wrapping this exe and your python program in a meta-executable that launches both should be possible with some work. Of course you won't have the benefits if the AIR installer etc in this case.

Answer 3

OK, so since it didn't seem possible to go that way around, I came up with an alternative that seems to work for what I want.

Instead of trying to embed Python inside AIR, I've gone the other way around: I'm building my Python code into a stand-alone executable using PyInstaller and bundling the AIR application as a resource. The Python code then starts up it's webserver and fires off the AIR app which can then connect to the (local) remote services as required.