I create web applications most in RoR and PHP. About a year ago a company wanted

Question

I create web applications most in RoR and PHP. About a year ago a company wanted to use my app but in a stand alone browser window in Linux, so I wrote one in python using webkit, locked it down to just accessing the target web app, easily done.

Now what options do I have to do the same for Windows?

I want basic browser functionality such as going back and forward pages and to stop the script from loading. It will have to run stand alone or maybe install via .exe file. Sorry for my ignorance on this but I very rarely enter a Windows Environment.

Explanation / Answer

You have pretty much the same options, actually. WebKit is cross-platform, as are other browser engines.

Also, I'd think that quite a lot of general purpose mainstream programming languages would already provide a "WebView" component that should be good enough for most use cases.

For instance, Java has had this capability for quite a long while. Though I'd expect it wasn't rocket fast for the time and would scream for its mommy with the amount of JS that's now present in most web-apps; but surely that must have improved as well over time.

Android has such a WebView, that pretty much allows to invoke the Android Browser (not sure what happens now that newer versions have switched to Chrome for Android, actually; I don't know if that view now relies on a stripped view of the legacy browser or or the mobile Chrome one).

.NET has a similar capability to invoke the same components as the ones used by IE.

And so on.

But if your thing is done with Python and WebKit and some graphic toolkit, I'd be surprised if you can't get it to run on Windows as well.

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