Daniel Quinn

Depending 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:

1. Start webserver
2. 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 :-(