Greenfield: An In-Browser HTML5 Wayland Compositor

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Greenfield: An In-Browser HTML5 Wayland Compositor

Earlier this year we covered the Westfield project as Wayland for HTML5/JavaScript by providing a Wayland protocol parser and generator for JavaScript. Now that code has morphed into Greenfield to provide a working, in-browser HTML5 Wayland compositor...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Greenfield-HTML5-Wayland

[uid313]

This is cool, but what is it good for?

[Mr. Octus]

This is cool, but what is it good for?

HTML5 Gaming? I'm not sure either. Cool project regardless.

[bitman]

People were making fun of Emacs being it's own OS, but now we are getting a compositor for anything-electron

[Vistaus]

This is cool, but what is it good for?

I think for running entire desktops in a browser tab? If so, then it's basically like the Wayland counterpart of Xiwi: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton...S-window-(xiwi)

[jhenke]

The usual web developer nonsense. I still not get why people consider it a good idea to build an OS inside the browser, but I guess they need something for their shiny MacBook Pros to do while drinking coffee /sarkasm off

[bachchain]

Who needs rust when you have javascript

[tildearrow]

Typo:

Greenfrield is using Westfield paired with WebRTC to provide this working in-browser compositor.

[tinko]

The usual web developer nonsense. I still not get why people consider it a good idea to build an OS inside the browser, but I guess they need something for their shiny MacBook Pros to do while drinking coffee /sarkasm off

I can see the point. If your software runs in a browser, it is as cross-platform as it gets. The distribution is quite convenient (you type an URL/you scan some QR code and you're running the software) and everybody already has the runtime environment (and by now, it even updates automatically for most people). It is not a native executable, but neither are Java or C# applications. The main issue (other than the fact, that it's not compiled, which I still consider necessary for performance-critical code) I have with it, is the fact that JavaScript is not a very pretty language, but that issue is being worked on, and that it still lacks good libraries in many areas.

[starshipeleven]

I can see the point. If your software runs in a browser, it is as cross-platform as it gets.

This is true, but if you are targeting a browser already, then it makes no sense to require the browser to have a wayland compositor inside it.

Webapplications are basically static-ish websites animated by javascript, and they run fine.