[Gambas-devel] potential for web-based, cross-platform GAMBAS applications

[Rob]

On Monday 29 August 2011 14:48, Kevin Fishburne wrote:
> http://blog.chromium.org/2011/08/native-client-brings-sandboxed-
native.html
> If GAMBAS was made to work with it, any GAMBAS application could be run
> in a browser.

Well, "a browser" meaning Chrome, just like "a browser" with ActiveX and 
XBAP effectively meant Internet Exploder.  I'm sure someone will write a 
Firefox plugin and I'm sure the market penetration of that plugin will 
easily reach 2 to 3% of the Firefox user base. Well, maybe more if they get 
free Angry Birds out of it, but they already can play Angry Birds in HTML5.

Then you have the architecture issues (need ARM and x86 versions of your 
code, in this case the Gambas interpreter), and the same infrastructure 
issues you have with WebOS and Android, namely that there's no X server, so 
you need to write an X-less form component for Gambas and strip the X 
dependencies out of the other components.

It might actually be easier to make a gb.gtk3 based on gb.gtk, and use the 
new Gtk3 HTML5 rendering back end:

http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2010/11/23/gtk3-vs-html5/

It's about as mature as NaCl is (basically, not at all) but someday it 
might provide a nice migration path for Gtk apps, including those written 
in Gambas, and provide some interesting possibilities for hybrid 
web/desktop apps.

Rob