Google's Web App announcement

Google should be ashamed of their treatment of developers for things like this.

I think so - but the news of this seems to have been and gone and nobody really cared. I guess it'll hit the news again when everything stops working though :)

WHO is going to do that on-going engineering? The app developer or the platform provider?

Yeah, Web Apps looks great to me specifically because I'd done multiplatform app development before and knew how much it sucked and what a support headache it was... But with these platfiorms they don't make money from on the actual apps people make - so it's hardly surprising it's hard to justify continued funding.

The issue for me is that with Java, you had a JRE redistributable that you could use. Even if Sun/Oracle died, you had that file and could bundle it with your application. With Chrome you don't have that - Google are actively pushing updates so even if people could install the correct version of Chrome, Google would blow it away with one that didn't have the features.

@creationix that'd be great. You know that https://github.com/espruino/EspruinoWebI­DE can do WebSockets via node.js now (check out server.js)? So realistically you just need to embed the server, and then serve up index.html.

You can do it right now in JS - something like:

function onPageRequest(req, res) {
  res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/html'});
  res.end(iframe_linking_to_webide);
}

var server = require('ws').createServer(onPageRequest­);
server.listen(8000);
server.on("websocket", function(ws) {
    ws.on('message',function(d) { LoopbackB.write(d); });
    LoopbackB.on('data', function(d) { ws.send(d); });
    LoopbackA.setConsole();
});

But it'd be great if Websockets could be added to the existing C-based HTTP server as a first class citizen (it might still need to bit of work to cope with software resets, but it shouldn't be too painful)