The dart-gde has updated the chrome.dart to ‘0.4.0’. This release contains a whole rewrite of the project. All APIs are now generated from chrome apps/ext IDLs. Most unit tests from previous chrome.dart have been ported.

About chrome.dart

chrome.dart package provides the generated APIs to access chrome apps & extensions through dart interfaces. The APIs depend on the js-interop to communicate with the javascript vm for accessing the APIs. Currently no native interfaces exist between dart vm and chrome browser. In a later point in time those interfaces will exist, for now this provides a way to access those interfaces.

chrome_gen.dart -> chrome.dart

At first chrome_gen.dart was the project that kicked off moving to generated APIs. It was getting frustrating having to hand write, maintain and test chrome.dart. We did avoid looking into generation from IDL, because the IDL in the chromium is in two different formats json & chrome specific WebIDL. The nice part about the original chrome.dart package is we could introduce more structure for the APIs then what the generated javascript APIs looked like. So after initial development by Devon Carew, we decided it was a better direction to use parsers and generators to create and maintain the APIs. Four months later we had a 90% complete package that was already being used by a few projects, including spark. We are able to generate enough structure to keep nice APIs and generate form the IDL, this was a win for the project.

Documentation

The API documentation is automatically generated for Apps and Extensions on each check in. A few wiki pages exist and we are in the process of migrating them from chrome_gen.dart wiki -> chrome.dart wiki. We do need help and welcome pull requests and wiki edits.

Samples

Currently the best source of project setup exists with app in the project. The app folder in a dart project will not have the automatic symlinks generated by pub. That helps out greatly since it would pollute our folder structure and cause bad things to happen. Instead we have a simple setup_app.dart script that helps build and copy packages over to the app folder. Right now its specific for the chrome.dart project but should be easy to replicate for your own chrome apps or extensions. Another neat script which is mac specific but could be generalized is load_app.sh. load_app.sh shows a simple way to load up an application in app folder from command line.

Helping out

We still need more unit tests, documentation, and additional development. If your interested checkout the github issues or send pull requests.

Thanks!

To all the contributors on this project Devon Carew, Kevin Moore, Ross Smith, Marc Fisher