Phani Kumar’s Blog

Google gears is the latest craze in the tech circles. Google Gears is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality.

Google gears has

• A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server
• A database, to store and access data from within the browser
• A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background

The ease with which the Google gears application is deployed made me search for ways so that we can easily deploy web applications which has always been a pain. After little bit of googling i found Silver Catalyst, a web application that we can start using it right out of the box.

Silver Catalyst was written in Python using the Django framework. Normal process to run would be to setup a web server, get Django working with it, setup a database, install python, deploy the application and finally configure it to point to the right files.Phew!!

Silver Catalyst gives us a workaround. It uses

1. ToofPy web server with some modifications so that it is pre-configured to run Django.
2. sqlite3 an embedded database, which comes in the size of 250 kb.
3. cx_freeze a utility that will take the python code, check the included libraries and package everything along with the current python version into an executable. Very cool! A bonus was that you would not even need python installed to run the tool since the interpreter is packaged in the executable.

The result?

We can just run the executable and the server starts. We can access the server via a browser and we go straight into the Silver Catalyst application.

Toofpy and cx_freeze are python specific tools. I guess there would be similar tools for other languages as well or an all in one tool