Welcome to webkitpony’s documentation!¶
“building webapp-like desktop applications in python”
webkitpony is a micro framework to build dektop applications with web technologies on the basis of the python binding of the webkit rendering engine (http://code.google.com/p/pywebkitgtk/).
The project is hosted on github: https://github.com/tonimichel/webkitpony
Artwork by IYOMI
Motivation¶
Building desktop applications with standard toolkits like GTK works fine - but tweaking the UI beyond the boundaries of window managers is exhausting. In contrast, building a web ui with HTML, Javascript and CSS is quite flexible. Acctually, the motivation behind webkitpony was to stay in a djangonaut-familiar environment when it comes to build desktop applications. As the basic technology (the webkit rendering engine) was given - it was about playing around and creating a simple-to-use django-like development process. The result was webkitpony.
At schnapptack, we use this approach for building desktop applications or solutions that explicitely need a non-browser client. Often we also combine having native logic and remote logic from a web application.
Goal¶
The goal of webkitpony is to provide an alternative to standard desktop application development approaches. It especially targets on developers familiar with django. However, the framework is so simple, that even non-django programmers will get the point fastly.