Any way to create an application with the local web page as an interface?

Question

A few days ago I decided to make my own "interface" to make it easier to organize (and work with) some of my personal files. You know when a lot of related data, pictures and links are right in front of you and you can change them in a couple of clicks, this is very convenient.

I started by studying HTML, CSS and JS, because I thought that the changes made to the local page would be saved somewhere on my PC so I can just run Index.html and do whatever I want. But they didn't. Refreshing the page erased all changes.

Using browser localstorage does not suit me, because if I change the browser, the data will be lost. I wanted it to just open with Index.html and work fine even if I change my browser or move the site folder to another computer.

Then I decided to learn more about server-side languages (such as PHP or Node.js) because they are directly related to databases, so I was hoping to save changes through them. But these languages required me to really open the server, with ip and port tracking. And I just wanted to open a local page through one file, without any ports or connections via the console. So this method scared me off quickly.

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So is there an easy way to make a local page like this? Maybe I have not studied well one of the above methods and it has this opportunity?
Or the best I can hope for is a simple application that will use that local page as an interface to interact with data? I accidentally heard about this possibility a long time ago. Then I will ask you to give at least a hint as to which language to choose for this.

I don't understand well everything that lies outside of vanilla HTML, CSS and JS, so a complete study of a complex language like Java or Python will be too difficult for me, and the goal is not worth such a lot of effort.

Answer 1

I hope I understand correcly what you are trying to do.

If your goal is to make an application to manage your files, I think the simplest solution will be, as you said, to look into NodeJS and the File system api which will let you interact with your files through javascript code.

Your program will have to be in two part that will have to interact:

• the "front" html page
• the "back" nodejs script

The downside is that you'll have to go deeper into your study of the language to learn how to create the interactions you want between your html file and your NodeJS application. However, there is no need to open your server to the web to make it work. The NodeJS application can be set to listen to requests from only the computer that runs it (localhost).

I obviously can't get too much into details without knowing precisely what you want to do but you'll probably have to learn to make a local server with node (search "nodejs http" or "nodejs express"), then make requests to it via the html page's scripts (search "ajax request").

Answer 2

What you need to look into are (web based) content management systems. like strapi or "grand old dame" WordPress.