This is a question and a meditation.

I've been working on a very light-weight replacement for Quicken (which sucks rocks) and, obviously, Perl CGI is the way to go. There's modules that parse QIF's, DBD::SQLite is a great mini-datastore, and HTML is the easiest way to make things happen. But, I don't want to set up a webserver just to do my books. And, since I'm going to be running this on Win32, cygwin is annoying to work with as a production environment, even for small apps.

So, I was wondering if this is possible:

  1. You open a file on your machine.
  2. IE looks at the file and executes it
  3. That file returns back some HTML, which IE displays.
  4. All the links go back to that file, causing step #2 to reoccur.

That's the question. The meditation is this - if this were possible, what does that open up in terms of distributability of apps, especially on Win32. IE is an excellent UI, the known HTML limitations aside. You are more easily able to maintain state (because you're guaranteed you only have one user). Anyone ever do anything remotely similar to this?

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Then there are Damian modules.... *sigh* ... that's not about being less-lazy -- that's about being on some really good drugs -- you know, there is no spoon. - flyingmoose

In reply to Browsers as stand-alone UI by dragonchild

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.