Ok, here's a sort of wild idea, and stop me if this has been done already. But how about someone design some kind of LAMP application interface with a trimmed down phpMyAdmin, a simplified Apache, WebUI (maybe firefox based?), a trimmed down MySQL (or equivalent light weight database) with full support for Javascript, PHP, and other things.

In short the idea is to have something separate from the web browser that takes one particular bundled module (php scripts + database + ui xhtml code all in one zip file) and runs it like you would see it on the web, but as an application instead. It's an idea that's probably already been suggested and subsequently blown out of the water, but since I didn't see anything with this specific setup mentioned, I figured to broach the question.

Well, if you're not hell-bent on PHP, web2py does all that (and a lot more) with Python. I have been using it on my tablets for a few years, and of course now on the N900. I gave a talk about it at the first Maemo Summit in Berlin (see my blog, in the sig).

Eh, I'm not a huge fan of Python. It just feels clunky to me.

Compared with PHP? Not heard that before! :-)

That's a new one, yeah :-)

If you want to be objective, compare all that ungzipping the web2py archive immediately makes available to you (ie everything you asked for and more, including the http server, ajax and whatnot), with the work needed to package, integrate and/or code all the various bits 'n pieces for the LAMP framework you asked about.

I can tell you you've already lost the race :-)