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1 year agoDepending on how complicated you’re willing to allow it to be to run locally, you could just run a webserver right on the desktop. Bind it to localhost:8000 so there’s no risk of someone exploiting it via the network, anf then your startup script is just:
- Start webserver
- Open browser to http://localhost:800/
It’s not smooth, or professional-looking, but it’s easy ;-)
If you want something a little more slick, I would probably lean more toward “Path 2” as you call it. The webserver isn’t really necessary after all, since you’re not even using a network.
One option that you might not have considered however could be to rewrite the whole thing in JavaScript and port it to a static web page. Hosting costs on something like that approaches £0, but you have to write JavaScript :-(
The thing is, none of the suggested alternatives can do what pickle does, and the article focuses on a narrow (albeit ubiquitous) use case: serialisation of untrusted data.
There are still legitimate use cases for pickle, especially when storing, caching, or comparing objects that can’t easily be serialised with say, JSON or TOML. It’s a question of using the right thing for the right job is all, and pretending like JSON is a comparable alternative to pickle doesn’t help anyone.