Woohoo!

Chumby is coming and has a bunch of widgets and third parties can write them.

They're in Flash, which is racing to be the client-side virtual machine of choice. (In fact Adobe are really on a roll these days.)

In fact, with things like WiiFlash and Chumby, it looks like Flash is very plausible as a scripting glue to bind together a network of devices and controllers.

Bruce Eckel hooks Python to Flex .

I wonder if that's the answer to my problem for where to go with desktop applications like SdiDesk.