While searching and experimenting for ways to pass context variables to templates in Django, I found a way that avoids the longer route of passing a custom context function through TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS in the settings file and using RequestContext in every view function. The approach involves creating a single function that returns a context dictionary and just using this to update every view function where the custom context is needed.

DjangoApp (renamed as Portable Django) grew out of a need to package a Django project into a desktop application. Instead of embedding it within a desktop GUI program, my solution was to build a self-contained Python/Django environment that can be launched by a simple launcher app. I figured that this can be useful for development purposes as well as for learning. 

Bottle is a fast, simple and lightweight WSGI micro web-framework for Python. It is similar to Flask, but it is even more lightweight and minimal. In fact, the whole framework is contained in a single 44kb file (as of version 0.9.6). If you don't need many of the built-in functions in Flask or any bigger Python web framework, I personally recommend to use Bottle. Now, I am using it to build a simple static website in Google App Engine. Bottle is pluggable to other modules if there's a need to add other goodies.