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

[Daniel Drake]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 6:42 PM, Daniel Narvaez <dwnarvaez at gmail.com> wrote:
> I might not have yet made explicit what a web application provides on the
> top of an html page loaded in a browser, which is what we get with 1. Taking
> a look to the Chromium documentation is a good way to get an idea of it.
>
> http://developer.chrome.com/trunk/apps/api_index.html

Thanks, I was waiting for someone to succinctly explain the perceived
benefit of using Chrome as a backend for this project, and this seems
to be it.

One way to think about this is that we are used to Python, which has a
nice standard library. But javascript basically doesn't have that. And
this Chrome API provides some kind of equivalent.

For this discussion, we might divide the Chrome API into 2 different parts

1. General utility functions (e.g. i18n, events)
2. Integration with low level system functions (e.g. bluetooth)

I would say we have multiple alternatives for #1. e.g. qooxdoo is one
that I am familiar with.

So the real benefit of the Chrome thing is the system integration? Is
that something really needed for Sugar? It would be necessary if we
were to port *all* Sugar activities to javascript, but I am not sure
if that is our goal. There are certainly a lot of things that can be
done without such system access.

I also have some other concerns about using Chrome as a backend
(please correct any inaccuracies):

1. We have to accept all constraints of Chrome - both present and
future. We have found two already: the challenges of handling of
multiple versions, and the challenges of making this system work
without having chrome running in the background all the time.

2. From my limited understanding, Chrome/Chromium is technically an
open source project, since code is made available, but does not fit
under many more definitions of "open source project". It's not
something that is developed in the open with decisions run past the
community etc. That doesn't fit the Sugar model very well.

3. I see this project as a way of taking us closer to Sugar (in some
sense) on Android. Can Chrome webapps work as first-class citizens on
Android?

> (Hopefully they will some day converge between browsers!).

There is already convergence in the "utility function" part of such
APIs - for example you can take qooxdoo and use all of its API on any
browser.

I think it is only a matter of time until some kind of system emerges
that provides a browser-independent API to low level system functions
as well. (or maybe we already have that: gobject-introspection, which
can be used in javascript?)

Daniel