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The last couple of weeks since we open sourced Chromium OS have been pretty exciting. The discussion groups have been buzzing and a number of sites have put up Chromium OS builds for download. While we're happy that developers have been building Chromium OS there are a few things we would like to clarify:


* This is not ready for consumers yet — everything you see can and probably will change by the time Google Chrome OS-based devices are available late next year.
* Please note that Google has not released an official binary for Chromium OS and therefore if you download Chromium OS binaries please ensure that you trust the site you are downloading them from.
* While we will try our best to help you through the Chromium discussion forums, we will not be officially supporting any of these builds. Remember that you are downloading that specific site/developer's build of Chromium OS.

We have also received a number of questions that we wanted to answer directly and so we put together the [1]following FAQ to clarify some of these issues.




One of the top questions has been around the distinction between Google Chrome OS and Chromium OS. Google Chrome OS is to Chromium OS what Google Chrome browser is to Chromium. Chromium OS is the open source project, used primarily by developers, with code that is available for anyone to checkout, modify and build their own version with. Meanwhile, Google Chrome OS is the Google product that OEMs will ship on Netbooks next year. Therefore, dear developers who have built and posted Chromium OS binaries, you're awesome and we appreciate what you are doing, however we have to ask you to call the binaries you've put up for download "Chromium OS" and not "Google Chrome OS".




Thanks!Posted by Martin Bligh, Software Engineer

[2]


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Source: [3]https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=2471378914199150966&postID=9057068078222306441


[1] <http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/how-tos-and-troubleshooting/developer-faq>
[2] <https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2471378914199150966-9057068078222306441?l=blog.chromium.org>
[3] <https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=2471378914199150966&amp;postID=9057068078222306441>

Google is one of the [1]Khronos member companies helping to develop the [2]WebGL specification, bringing hardware accelerated 3D rendering to the web via the Canvas element. Today is the release of the initial public draft of the WebGL spec. We're happy to announce that Chromium contains provisional WebGL support on Linux (32- and 64-bit), Mac and Windows. This implementation was developed in close collaboration with Apple Computer and utilizes much shared code from [3]WebKit.




See [4]Getting a WebGL Implementation for instructions on getting a Chromium build and enabling WebGL support. This is an early version with many caveats, but with it you can get a taste of the new functionality coming to the web.




Here are a few demos to whet your appetite:


* [5]San Angeles futuristic cityscape demo
* [6]Shiny teapot demo illustrating compositing of 3D graphics with the web page
* [7]Particle system demo showing how to use the GPU to animate particles

The [8]WebGL wiki is the central location for information about the evolving specification, including the draft spec, introductory articles, tutorials, mailing lists and forums. See the [9]WebGL demo repository for more demos and instructions on how to check out their source code.




We're looking forward to finalizing the WebGL specification and making this functionality available to web developers, and look forward to your feedback. For Chromium-specific questions, use the [10]Chromium-dev mailing list, for more general WebGL questions, use the [11]WebGL forums or [12]WebGL public mailing list.


Posted by Ken Russell, Software Engineer

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Source: [14]https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=2471378914199150966&postID=2406596945710352392


[1] <http://www.khronos.org/>
[2] <http://www.khronos.org/webgl/>
[3] <http://webkit.org/>
[4] <http://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/Getting_a_WebGL_Implementation>
[5] <https://cvs.khronos.org/svn/repos/registry/trunk/public/webgl/sdk/demos/google/san-angeles/index.html>
[6] <https://cvs.khronos.org/svn/repos/registry/trunk/public/webgl/sdk/demos/google/shiny-teapot/index.html>
[7] <https://cvs.khronos.org/svn/repos/registry/trunk/public/webgl/sdk/demos/google/particles/index.html>
[8] <http://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki>
[9] <http://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/Demo_Repository>
[10] <http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev>
[11] <http://www.khronos.org/message_boards/viewforum.php?f=34>
[12] <http://www.khronos.org/webgl/public-mailing-list/>
[13] <https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2471378914199150966-2406596945710352392?l=blog.chromium.org>
[14] <https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=2471378914199150966&amp;postID=2406596945710352392>

Starting in the Google Chrome [1]developer channel release 4.0.249.0, Web Sockets are available and enabled by default. Web Sockets are "TCP for the Web," a next-generation bidirectional communication technology for web applications being standardized in part of [2]Web Applications 1.0. We've implemented this feature as described in our design docs for [3]WebKit and [4]Chromium.




The [5]Web Sockets API enables web applications to handle bidirectional communications with server-side process in a straightforward way. Developers have been using XMLHttpRequest ("XHR") for such purposes, but XHR makes developing web applications that communicate back and forth to the server unnecessarily complex. XHR is basically asynchronous HTTP, and because you need to use a tricky technique like long-hanging GET for sending data from the server to the browser, simple tasks rapidly become complex. As opposed to XMLHttpRequest, Web Sockets provide a real bidirectional communication channel in your browser. Once you get a Web Socket connection, you can send data from browser to server by calling a send() method, and receive data from server to browser by an onmessage event handler. A simple example is included below.




if ("WebSocket" in window) {
var ws = new WebSocket("ws://example.com/service");
ws.onopen = function() {
// Web Socket is connected. You can send data by send() method.
ws.send("message to send"); ....
};
ws.onmessage = function (evt) { var received_msg = evt.data; ... };
ws.onclose = function() { // websocket is closed. };
} else {
// the browser doesn't support WebSocket.
}




In addition to the new Web Sockets API, there is also a new protocol (the "[6]web socket protocol") that the browser uses to communicate with servers. The protocol is not raw TCP because it needs to provide the browser's "same-origin" security model. It's also not HTTP because web socket traffic differers from HTTP's request-response model. Web socket communications using the new web socket protocol should use less bandwidth because, unlike a series of XHRs and hanging GETs, no headers are exchanged once the single connection has been established. To use this new API and protocol and take advantage of the simpler programming model and more efficient network traffic, you do need a new server implementation to communicate with — but don't worry. We also developed [7]pywebsocket, which can be used as an Apache extension module, or can even be run as standalone server.




You can use Google Chrome and pywebsocket to start implementing Web Socket-enabled web applications now. We're more than happy to hear your feedback not only on our implementation, but also on API and/or protocol design. The protocol has not been completely locked down and is still in discussion in IETF, so we are especially grateful for any early adopter feedback.


Posted by Yuzo Fujishima (藤島 勇造), Fumitoshi Ukai (鵜飼 文敏), and Takeshi Yoshino (吉野 剛史), Software Engineers

[8]


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Source: [9]https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=2471378914199150966&postID=7619714792016433254


[1] <http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel>
[2] <http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete.html>
[3] <http://docs.google.com/View?docID=dfm7gfvg_0fpjg22gh&revision=_latest>
[4] <http://docs.google.com/View?docID=dfm7gfvg_1dm97qxgm&revision=_latest>
[5] <http://dev.w3.org/html5/websockets/>
[6] <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hixie-thewebsocketprotocol-55>
[7] <http://code.google.com/p/pywebsocket>
[8] <https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2471378914199150966-7619714792016433254?l=blog.chromium.org>
[9] <https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=2471378914199150966&amp;postID=7619714792016433254>

if ("WebSocket" in window) {
  var ws = new WebSocket("ws://example.com/service");
  ws.onopen = function() {
    // Web Socket is connected. You can send data by send() method.
    ws.send("message to send"); ....
  };
  ws.onmessage = function (evt) { var received_msg = evt.data; ... };
  ws.onclose = function() { // websocket is closed. };
} else {
  // the browser doesn't support WebSocket.
}