Host web application on a desktop

Question

Hi,

Just want to wrap a page inside a desktop window on Windows, Linux and Mac.

The user see standard (for the given OS) look (window, close/minimise buttons etc).

But it would basically just be a browser inside that window.

Additional things I want to achieve (apart from the ones every browser has):

• Application should be able to require an attention 'unobtrusively' (maybe just flash some icon for a second), so user can choose some option and it would hide till next time.
• Possibly pop-up a small window.

I would really like to keep the desktop part as small as possible, so it would be just a wrapper over the web site. Thus Flex probably is not the best choice (never tried though).

What for: time-tracking site with easier, periodic time input.

How would you go about that?

Thanks,
Dmitriy.

Answer 1

Since the "app" portion is rather simple, I would probably choose to create 3 separate applications written in native platform APIs. For instance, a Win32 (or event .NET) application for Windows, GTK+ for Linux, and Cocoa for Mac OS X. Now, if this was a large app this would probably more than it's worth. The other alternative is RealBASIC, which has support for doing this sort of thing and utilizes native GUI widgets for the most part. Nevertheless, I would choose the former method. All three of the platforms support some sort of "Web Browser" component that can be placed on a form and provide events and expose properties, etc.