Nice project! I recently thought a lot about how to blend web & desktop apps and currently my stack consists mostly of Qt and Python (e.g. via PySide or PyQt). Qt is a really awesome toolkit and allows me to make a cross-platform app with native look and feel. At the same time, I can integrate dynamic web pages via QWebKit and make them exchange data with my application. In addition, Qt makes it really easy to integrate custom Qt widgets into the content displayed by QWebkit, roughly like you can with ActiveX components. Also, you can make an executable via py2exe or similar packages.