Change server HTML app into self-contained desktop app

Question

I wrote a simple web server that takes the public link to a google document containing image urls and names and outputs a print-friendly HTML photo directory with its contents.

I created it for a volunteer organization that I will no longer be able to stay involved in. I need to pass on the ability to generate that directory to my successor.

I'm not confident that I can trust myself to maintain that web application for the long term the organization needs. I'm hoping that instead I can change it to a self contained program, that members of the org could email around to whoever needed to generate the directory.

My first thought was to make a .html file the could open in a browser but I can't download the CSV data from google with Ajax, because it is cross domain. After googling there doesn't seem to be a way around this.

Is there a straightforward framework? I would guess I could do it with Adobe AIR, but I'd prefer something that simply removed the cross domain security feature.

I could take the time to embed a UIWebView into a Mac app, but since I want to write the app primarily in HTML, I'd have to create a bridge to let the web view make a cross domain request anyway right? Also it's not cross platform.

Any other ideas? How can I package my app as a desktop application instead of a web service?

Answer 1

You can get around the cross domain XHR using flash. CrossXhr can do it from apps served by regular http servers. I've never tried it with a static, file-served webapp. Follow the instructions here:

http://code.google.com/p/crossxhr/wiki/CrossXhr