Evaluate whether Chrome extension subsystem can/should be reused in Crosswalk about crosswalk HOT 3 CLOSED

@tmpsantos, when you come back, could you add the results of your investigation here?

from crosswalk.

The current status of the Chromium Extensions subsystem makes it difficult to use it "as it is" on the Crosswalk project. Each attempt of import a file makes you pull several others in a chain reaction. Maintaining a patched copy of the Chromium code sounds unmaintainable to me.

Google engineers stated that they wanted the system modular enough that it could be used on the content_shell, but I don't see this happening soon, as the major bug tracking this development is moving slowly:
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=159265

Extension currently depends on Profile, they take Incognito windows into account and the ExtensionSystem class which has deep roots on the Chromium Browser internals. The Chromium Extensions also includes content scripts, which we don't really care about at the moment (we only want js API's) and would be just a burden/dead code.

What we can try to extract from the current Extensions is the mechanism of generating code out from IDL's and exposing these API's on the renderer process and serializing data to the backend.

from crosswalk.

For the record:

Our goals for Crosswalk Extensions were different from Chrome Extensions. We were focused mainly on providing a way to add new JS APIs backed with non-sandboxed native code. Chrome Extensions were about two things: extending the browser using JS/HTML (and chrome-specific APIs), as well as the notion of chrome packaged apps.

As noted above the code for Chrome extensions is still inside chrome/. Work started for moving it out but not much. The parts that we could consider reusing are not moved yet at the moment. While we could try to dig some internal classes to share, this wouldn't be practical, since we are using older-than-trunk Chromium versions and code is in high flux.

Last but not least, having our own code for extensions allowed us to experiment with things like: running separated extensions in threads or different processes, lazily loading our bindings, among others.

from crosswalk.