0xDECAFBAD

Still have been busy like crazy, but as I wrote back in April, some of what I’m doing has been pulling me further into Flash MX and XML. Also, in the few moments of free time I’ve had lately, I’ve been toying with my own news aggregator. It’s a PersonalServer, written in Python, based on Twisted, and uses SQLite via PySQLite for storage and juggling of items.

So, today I’ve been thinking: How hard would it be to bundle together a desktop app composed of a backend in Python and a GUI in Flash? Connecting the two is no problem given whatever method of XML communication you want to pass between them. Pairing the two together to be launched on the guest OS would seem to be a bit of an oddity.

See, I like my news aggregator GUI in the browser. It seems native there. But on the other hand, as far as interfaces go, what I want to make the browser do tends to sound ugly. I mean, yeah, there’re all sorts of DHTML and CSS tricks and XUL looks promising, but damn have I been noticing how slick Flash is lately. And fiddling around with ?ActionScript has been pretty fun lately.
?JavaScript has gotten a pretty bad reputation via crashy implementations, but as dynamic scripting languages go, there are some nifty elegances I can pull off in it.

So… I’ve been reading a bit about Macromedia’s Central as far as desktop Flash goes, and I’ve seen the News Aggregator sample app, but how about a maniacal mutant hybrid of Python and Flash? shortname=flash_agg