Something called the P2P API can be turned on through the about:flags menu in the latest builds of Chromium, the open source browser that serves as the basis for Google Chrome. The discovery was made by Daniel Cawrey at thechromesource. The description of the option reads: “Enables P2P Pepper API and P2P JavaScript API. The API is under development, and doesn’t work yet.”
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For those not familiar, the Pepper Plugin API (PPAPI) is Google’s API for its Native Client (NaCl) plugin. NaCl, which we covered last year enables developers to run native C and C++ in Chrome 10.
The trouble is that Chrome is the only browser with NaCl support, which could lead to Web fragmentation. As Sebastian Anthony writes for Switched: “If NaCl gains enough traction, Chrome could become the next IE6.” But since NaCl will be available as a plugin for other browsers, perhaps it would be more fair to say that NaCl could become the next Flash or Java.
The main point, however, of NaCl is probably to enable developers to create more advanced applications, such as video editors or audio processors, for ChromeOS. Given that, it seems like the P2P API, whatever it is, will also be for ChromeOS developers. Still, we can hope that it will enable some cool distributed Web applications.
Google has introduced another interesting feature recently: the ability to run Chrome Web Store apps in the background.
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