back to article Application publishing gets the WebAssembly treatment

British outfit Droplet Computing thinks it’s found a new way to package and publish applications, by bundling them up to run using WebAssembly so they can run in a browser, online or offline. WebAssembly is a low-level safe binary format designed to allow C/C++ code to run in web browsers. Droplet’s eyed off WebAssembly since …

  1. steelpillow Silver badge

    When your front end is your back end

    "The company ... is awake to the potential for servers to run in browsers too."

    "Browser" seems a bit of an understatement. More like incorporating native web rendering into your OS. Just replace file: calls by http: calls and carry right on. I do hope it's https or the attack surface will be horrifying.

  2. thames

    El Reg said: "The technology is a W3C standard, emerged from Apple and promises a secure sandbox running inside a browser."

    That will come as a surprise to the people who actually developed WebAssembly. Here's one of the original announcements: https://brendaneich.com/2015/06/from-asm-js-to-webassembly/

    Who: A W3C Community Group, the WebAssembly CG, open to all. As you can see from the github logs, WebAssembly has so far been a joint effort among Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and a few other folks. I’m sorry the work was done via a private github account at first, but that was a temporary measure to help the several big companies reach consensus and buy into the long-term cooperative game that must be played to pull this off.

    So far as I know, WebAssembly actually came out of primarily Mozilla's success with ASM.js, plus some of Google's work with the less successful PNaCl.

  3. Chris Hills

    I run apps in the browser with a poor man's citrix environment using xpra from the winswitch project.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I run apps in the browser using HyperText. HyperText Applications. HTA

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    In other words something like the original Star Office.

  6. SVV

    I like the use of the word "safe"

    "WebAssembly is a low-level safe binary format designed to allow C/C++ code to run in web browsers. "

    Who's in the sweepstake as to when the first story is published here that this way of running any old C/C++ in browsers in "apps not applets" has lead to a massive security breach using an exploit in the browser code to maliciously cause lamentable consequences on users' computers?

    Extra points for the first comment on the story that links back to this round of comments and says "we told you so".

  7. jelleebean

    It's in the process of being patented

    From the website:

    "...Droplet Computing is redefining application delivery with its patent-pending application container technology. Enabling applications to be delivered on any device by decoupling your applications from the OS for online and offline use, delivering significant business value by providing costs savings, increasing user productivity and so much more.."

    As Scooby Doo would say "Yiiikes!"

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    English?

    As a native speaker, from England's green and pleasant lands....I don't understand what the following sentence means...

    "Droplet’s eyed off WebAssembly since before it was baked into Edge, Chrome, Firefox and Safari"

    What is "eyed off" and is droplet here a company name or something else, it's really not clear!

  9. Phil Endecott

    It’s unfortunate that they’ve chosen the same word, “droplet”, that Digital Ocean use to describe their virtual machines.

  10. Deltics
    Pint

    What in the name of all that's angled or curly does WebAssembly have to do with C/C++ ?

    WebAssembly is just a VM standard. It may reference C/C++ as examples as the sorts of languages that could target it but this is primarily because those languages are built on compiler stacks with re-targetable back-ends, not because WebAssembly is specifically aimed at C/C++ (or Rust, which also get's a nod).

    It's rather an alternative to JavaScript which, incidentally, some have used as a back-end target on alternative front-end language implementation, e.g. SmartMobile Studio which transpiles Pascal into JavaScript or even the likes of TypeScript et al.

    RemObjects recently added WebAssembly as a back-end to their compiler stack, which means you can target WebAssembly using C#, ObjectPascal, Swift or Java, since these are the front-ends already available on that stack.

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