I've recently discovered several applications: SickBeard, CouchPotato, and Headphones. It blows me away how these scripts have a user interface that is entirely web based. I'm wondering how this wizardry is accomplished without a web server? I haven't had time yet to dig through the code so I figured I'd ask here if anyone could point me to some reference material as to how to do this (run desktop applications that use a web user interface instead of pyQt4, GTK+, etc, etc)

My mind spins in circles and explodes just thinking about the effort it would take to do this in my Windows applications (basically having to create a custom web server that is capable of handling POST/GET requests, etc).

Without looking at any of the apps, my guess is that they're integrating either Webkit or XULRunner. They use a browser rendering engine to render the UI and take input, and there's a bridge between the Javascript and the underlying Qt/GTK/Java libraries.

Here's some information about how to do it when you're using Qt:

http://qt-project.org/doc/qtwebkit.html

And here's a thread that Anisha Kaul started when she was actually using this technology:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...onsole-884674/