Chrome OS spotlights rapidly changing mobile Web environment

Google's announcement of its ambitious Chrome OS has thrown a spotlight on a number of emerging Web technologies that promise to transform mobile application development.

For enterprise IT, the transformation means faster, simpler development of mobile applications that can run inside powerful modern Web browsers, many based on the open source Webkit technology, and mimic many of the characteristics of native applications that are written for and compiled to a specific underlying operating system.

Both Google with Chrome OS and Palm with its webOS are making use of these same technologies, but doing so outside the browser. Both are using a Linux kernel as the foundation, then marrying it with the latest version of the open source Webkit HTML rendering and JavaScript engine, a kind of "headless" browser. The Webkit engine will act as the execution engine for native applications, accessing device and Linux features as needed, written in JavaScript.

This new breed of mobile Web applications (and Google's major revision of Gmail for mobile earlier this year is a good example) can be stored locally, along with user and other data, so it can run even without an Internet connection. Written in JavaScript, these applications can run up to five times faster than just a year ago, thanks to a new generation of powerful JavaScript engines. They offer a degree of interactivity and richness not possible before. And, at least in theory, such applications could run with any of the modern browsers that also support the latest relevant standards, such as HTML 5 and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 3.

They're much more sophisticated than Web widgets, or even the thousands of JavaScript or Zool extensions for FireFox, and much simpler to create than traditional browser plugins written in C or C++

But such mobile applications will also pose the same kind of security challenges as desktop browsers. Performance differences with native applications persist. Browser applications typically can't reach outside to access specific device features or OS services (though even that is in flux). And neither enterprise IT nor enterprise users may be ready to fully depend on their existing cellular or Wi-Fi networks for the essential Internet connectivity that these applications ultimately require.

"If you look at browser innovation over the last 12 months, there's been an unprecedented acceleration," says Matt Waddell, Chief of Staff, Mobile and Developer Products, Google. One area of innovation is the growing adoption of parts of the still-emerging HTML 5 spec. "[HTML 5] represents a brand new set of browser functionality, to enable an entirely new set of Web applications."

Google has already been making use of two key HTML 5 APIs: Database and Application (or "AppCache"). Both were used in the new mobile version of Gmail. Database lets a mobile browser locally store Gmail messages in a local MySQL database; AppCache lets it locally store the Gmail functions and user interface in JavaScript and CSS files.