Technically, providing a webserver is trivial. Providing a webserver that can only be accessed from the machine that it is being run on is somewhat harder, but is still not that difficult. There is no more difficulty installing this than there is any other stand-alone program.

However if saying that you've done so causes people to freak out, then it is a non-starter.

That's OK, it was somewhat of an only halfway serious joke suggestion anyways. A joke because for what you want to do, it isn't a good way of going about things. But halfway serious in that a lot of things which have no real point being web applications are made into web applications these days because lazy people want to avoid having to write a real GUI and rollout software when they don't have to.

Certainly at work we reflexively write things as web applications because that is just easier to do.

Cheers,
Ben