How Would I go about building an application that resides in a usb drive?

Hi friends thankyou for seeing this thread.

I'm having some difficulty trying to decide what type of software program/technology might be useful for building a program that will reside on a portable usb drive.

For instance I've come up with some great information on how to include the firefox browser onto a portable usb drive.

Now I would like to have for instance a webpage on the usb drive that has an html form:

Name, Adress, Phone

Then have those values saved to a file on the usb drive for instance an xml file.

Then beeing able to edit the data. Throught the same form or another form.

I'm pretty sure that you can't put php perl or apache onto a usb drive I maybe wrong.

How would you guys go about building something like this??

Since you are using and playing around with Firefox, you could investigate the world of XUL or attempt some of this with javascript.
XUL should give you the ability to make a nice form/dialog that runs from firefox/mozilla, and can give you the ability to write to and read files.

You can check out http://www.xulplanet.com for some tutorials and ideas.
You could theoretically place a trimmed down version of firefox on the USB drive, along with a preferences file, that sets the XUL 'page'(also on the drive) as the home page.
Then when the user executes firefox from the drive, it automatically starts your XUL app.

Or you could use the same concept and try to do it with just javascript and html.

There are many different ways that you could do this.
You could look into learning python, and writing your own from scratch. Depends on experience level, and what you want to learn. There are great forum sections on Devshed that cover python, and xul, and javascript.


Good luck--