[Sugar-devel] Chromium integration inside the sugar shell (was Re: Kicking off HTML5 activities work)

[Simon Schampijer]

On 04/11/2013 09:52 PM, Daniel Narvaez wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I spent some time today thinking and experimenting with Chromium
> integration and I have a more detailed plan to propose now.
>
> There is an important premise to be made. In both Chromium and Firefox OS,
> application's installation is very much in the hands of the web browser. It
> happens as the result of a user clicking on a button, inside a web store.
> Chromium is a bit more flexible but the other possibilities are basically
> just developer tools.
> I think this limits our possibilities a lot. We need to use the browser
> applications management, rather then installing applications ourselves and
> then launching them with some command line option. Of course Chromium is
> open source and we could develop the stuff which is missing. But, in my
> opinion it's just too much work and it's going to be a pain to maintain in
> the future, core developers are not going to care about it, given it's not
> important for their products.
>
> That said, I think I mostly figured out a plan to integrate with Chromium
> web apps management, without having to write a lot of code.
>
> * Chromium is started up with the sugar session, using the
> --no-startup-window, to make it invisible. The sugar extension has a
> "background" permission, which will keep it running even with no windows.
> * The extension runs a python script, using chrome.runtime.connectNative.
> Communication uses json-rpc wrapped in the message protocol supported by
> the extension. The python script fetches the list of installed activities

Hey Daniel,

I have an extension that is using management.getAll [1] to collect the 
extension info. I could not find any info about 
chrome.runtime.connectNative, it is not part of [2], do you have any 
pointers?

Thanks,
    Simon

[1] 
https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/management.html#type-ExtensionInfo
[2] http://developer.chrome.com/extensions/runtime.html