Starting a stand alone webapp

The concept of a web application is broader than you might guess: using the webbrowser as a graphical user interface (GUI) makes sense even if you are just running a stand alone application on a local machine. After all, every machine has a browser intalled nowadays, so using this as a GUI might save you from headaches trying to find a cross platform GUI toolkit that looks good and is familiar to the user.

In order to use the browser as a user interface we have to start it up in a platform independent way, start a web application framework serving our application at the same time and make sure that the new web browser window points to the correct location. This sounds like a lot of work but in Python this is actually rather straightforward.

Let's have a look at the following code:

import cherrypy
import webbrowser
import threading

def openbrowser():
 webbrowser.open('http://127.0.0.1:8080')

class Root(object):
 @cherrypy.expose
 def index(self):
  return 'Hi There'

if __name__ == "__main__":
 threading.Timer(3.0,openbrowser).start()
 cherrypy.quickstart(Root(),config={})

If you save the code above as webapp.py and you have CherryPy installed, you can start the program by typing the following in a terminal (or dos-box):
python webapp.py
It will start up a webserver running on your local machine that listens on port 8080. It will also start up a new browser window and direct it to http://127.0.0.1:8080. The Python version is not relevant here as we do not use any 3.x specific constructs.

The trick is to utilize Python's bundled module webbrowser to open a browser window in a cross platform compatible way as implemented in the openbrowser() function. We do not call this function right away though, because the browser then might start before there is a webserver running. We cannot start CherryPy first either, because the quickstart() function does not return. Therefor we instantiate a Timer object from the threading module and tell it to call our openbrowser() function after three seconds, which should be plenty of time for the CherryPy server to start.