Native Client brings sandboxed native code to Chrome Web Store apps
By
Christian Stefansen, Native Client TeamWouldn’t it be great
if you could create web apps using your existing C and C++ code?
Native Client lets you do just
that, and it is now enabled for Chrome Web Store apps in Google Chrome’s
beta channel.
Native Client apps live on the web platform, so you don’t need to create
separate versions of your app for each operating system. Rather than relying on OS-specific
APIs, Native Client apps use Pepper, a set of interfaces that provide C and C++ bindings to
the capabilities of HTML5. This means that once you’ve ported your code to Native Client, it
will work across different operating systems, and you only need to maintain one code
base.
Today Native Client supports the Pepper APIs for 2D graphics,
stereo audio, URL fetching, sandboxed local file access (
File API), and
asynchronous message passing to and from JavaScript. In future releases we will be adding
support for hardware accelerated 3D graphics (OpenGL ES 2.0), fullscreen mode, networking
(
WebSockets and peer-to-peer
connections), and much more. As new capabilities are added to HTML5 and Pepper, they will
become available to Native Client.
This functionality does not come at
the expense of security. To ensure that Native Client is as safe as JavaScript, Native Client
code is isolated from the operating system by two nested security sandboxes: the
Native Client
sandbox and the
Chrome
sandbox. And unlike NPAPI plugins or ActiveX controls, Native Client apps do not
have access to the underlying OS APIs.
We encourage you to start
developing apps with Native Client. You can download the SDK and find tutorials, examples, API
documentation, and our
FAQ on the
Native Client site. Once
version 14 of Chrome hits stable channel, you’ll be able to upload your Native Client apps to
the Chrome Web Store, where you can reach Chrome’s 160 million users.
The next milestone for Native Client is architecture independence:
Portable Native
Client (PNaCl) will achieve this by using
LLVM bitcode as the basis for the
distribution format for Native Client content, translating it to the actual target instruction
set before running. Until then the Chrome Web Store will be the only distribution channel for
Native Client apps. This will help us ensure that all Native Client apps are updated to PNaCl
when it’s ready – and in the meantime avoid the spread of instruction set architecture
dependent apps on the web. We’ll be providing updates on the progress of PNaCl on this
blog.
Christian Stefansen is the Product Manager for Native
Client. In his spare time, when he is not writing Native Client apps for fun, he likes playing
tennis, playing the piano, and living as a travel writer in India for a couple of weeks at a
timePosted by Scott Knaster,
Editor
