The thought of writing desktop apps using web technologies is weird but appealing. I've struggled with XULRunner, which I found to be powerful but difficult to

The thought of writing desktop apps using web technologies is weird but appealing. I've struggled with XULRunner, which I found to be powerful but difficult to use and lacking on documentation. I've tried Adobe Air which is nice, but has too much sandboxing and restrictions. (no ability to shell out to another program, for example) What I really would like is a simple webkit-based client that exposes its api to a higher-level language like Python. I actually started building one based on the Chromium Embedded Framework but temporarily put it on the shelf.