By now, some of you may have seen Google's new browser announcement, aka "Chrome" (http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/). I think what's exciting about this development is that there will finally be a modern, open source WebKit-based multi-platform browser engine that supports a plugin architecture and holds the promise of easier (?) hackability.
Last year, I experimented with a whole bunch of different ways to better integrate the browser-as-app-engine and desktop (http://jinsync.com/), and looking now I see a blog post in May 2007 where I talked about the "future of the web (app)" -- http://jinsync.com/?q=node/14 -- and alas it took a while but Gears came out, and a year+ later, a beta version of Chrome is out. (Interesting also that Chrome generally addresses the notions I mentioned in March 2007 -- http://jinsync.com/?q=node/12) And while a RESTfully Organic FF didn't quite happen ( http://lwu.vox.com/library/post/on-the-future-of-the-fox.html), I'm at least hopeful that Shoes and perhaps HacketyHack will find their way mayhap into Chrome. What do you folks think of that -- who wants to implement Shoes as a Chrome plugin so that somedaysoon HH will be but a button clicks (3x) away? I've been brainstorming interesting Chrome <-> Shoes interactions, and I generally like the idea of being able to embed Shoes apps into webpages, whether statically or dynamically, such that Shoes apps can hit back and troll the DOM jQuery/Hpricot style and Chrome can send events to Shoes. Maybe what I'm really saying is, why not Shoes where today we find Flash? While I'm not proposing that Shoes take over (yet) the SWF world, Shoes does have nice native platform integration in terms of Ruby / Ruby gems and of course the ability to touch local resources through Ruby and/or C-implemented libraries (Hpricot / Mongrel). But if that's off in the horizon, have any folks experimented with embedded Shoes in Mongrel or versa vice? I'd like to be able to send data RESTfully from my browser to Shoes apps (to do super colorful graphics and the like)... ~L
