14 DAY TRIAL // Google has started talking more about Native Client, its technology for writing web app which run as fast as native ones, but with the regular permissions web apps have.
Native Client enables developers to create apps in C or C++ and have them run on the users' machines via the web. This ensures that web apps can be as fast and as powerful as local, native applications.
Besides portability, there is another big reason why web applications aren't written with native code, security. JavaScript code only has limited access to the local system and that's a good thing.
Native Client (NaCl) aims to eliminate both problems, on the one hand Native Client apps will run on all architectures, eventually by using the same code, and, on the other, they'll be running in two sandboxes ensuring that it will be very hard for an attacker to get to your system.
Google has now enabled Native Client support by default in Google Chrome 14 Beta. With this step, three years' work is almost over and developers will soon be able to publish applications built on top of Native Client to the Web App Store.
"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," Christian Stefansen, Product Manager at Google, wrote.
"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," he announced.
Native Client relies on the Pepper APIs and doesn't allow access to any system API. At the moment, NaCl code has to be geared to the architecture it's going to run on, but Google is working on the next major step, PNaCL (Portable Native Client) which will allow developers to write a single code and compile once for any architecture.
This is the reason why only Web Store apps will be able to use NaCl for now, Google doesn't want apps in the wild that only work on one operating system and which may not work when it upgrades to PNaCl. All NaCl apps in the Chrome Store will be upgraded to use PNaCl when it becomes available.