Thanks, I'll take a look. I need the program to run as a particular linux/mac user so using a webserver is out (we tried). Part of what we are doing is doing svn commands so file ownership becomes a big pain.
Node can run as its own self-contained web server (the TileMill code is open source and on Github); python can actually do the same. We frequently create quick Django apps for data entry around here. It's nice, because anyone in the VPN can access it via the IP, and updates made to the server are instant for everyone.
If you created a quick django app, you would just need to run `python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000` from that user account, and anyone accessing the IP will make changes owned by the account you ran the command from.
Django is a huge framework though. You could check out Flask -
http://flask.pocoo.org/. Very stripped down and much easier to write a small app in. You'd basically just write a route that showed the control panel at a URL (like '/'), and another one that accepts GET or POST input from the form and figures out what commands to execute locally.