Native Client is coming to Google — soon. This is big news. Native Client is a technology that will enable a browser to run code over the Web, but not just JavaScript or Java — as regular software. It’s an approach that has profound technological implications in terms of software delivery, the cloud and, oh yeah, security.
In a mailing list posting Google Brad Chen, Google’s Native Client engineering manager, announced that Native Client (which had been just a research project) is now moving into it early production development phase.
“Based on our experience to date, we believe that the basic architecture of our system is sound and the implementation is supportable,” Chen wrote. “So now we are undertaking a number of tasks to transition Native Client from a research technology to a development platform.”
Among those tasks is getting the code into the Chromium project (Chromium is Google’s open source development effort that leads to Chrome browser releases). Currently, the Native Client is being implemented as a browser plug-in, though Google is planning on fully integrating the technology into the core of Chrome.
It’s hard to see exactly when Native Client will end up in Chrome, though Chen tries to address that issue…