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Message passing extensions

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Alexis Menard edited this page Jul 12, 2013 · 1 revision

Introduction: Why extensions?

While HTML5 APIs are growing every year, and covering more and more of the functionalities applications use, there are several use cases in which an user of Crosswalk, or even Crosswalk itself might need to expose new functionalities:

  • An application that embeds Crosswalk (either as a WebView or the full Crosswalk binary) might want to implement certain functionality using native code instead of JS, but still use this from the HTML/JS code.

  • A webruntime developed using Crosswalk needs to expose its own specific APIs, some examples would be: PhoneGap and Tizen.

  • Crosswalk itself might want to provide some specific APIs that doesn't make sense as part of the Web platform (so not suitable to be implemented in Blink). One example would be a Native Menu API for webapps running in the desktop.

We categorize extensions in two groups: builtin extensions, which are deployed as part of Crosswalk itself; and external extensions, to be used by applications embedding Crosswalk (either as a WebView or the full Crosswalk binary). An important part of external extensions is to figure out the API/ABI that the extension code need to follow to be successfully loaded by Crosswalk.

Some assumptions

  • We want to use sandbox for the renderer process, so we will have to exchange messages -- either explicitly or implicitly.

  • Extensions are a critical part of Crosswalk, so we want to explore that part as soon as possible. By exploring we mean not only developing but also using the extensions with Crosswalk when developing applications and webruntime(s).

  • Because of the previous point, we want a flexible system so we can evolve it.

Message passing extensions design

The core idea: expose a message passing API for extensions and allow them to provide JavaScript code to encapsulate it when necessary. An extension in the system will implement three operations:

  • GetJavaScriptAPI(), which returns the JavaScript API be executed in the renderer process initialization.

  • HandleMessage(), which will process a message from the renderer process.

and will be able to use

  • PostMessage(), which sends a message back to the renderer process.

This design is flexible enough so we can execute extension code both in the Browser Process (we might want to do that for Native Menu builtin extension), and in a different extension process -- the ideal case for external extensions.

Decision about which extensions will be installed on renderer process JS environment, and which extensions will receive messages from renderer process, are two ways to enforce permissions.

The typically predicted bottleneck in a system like this with IPC system, but there are some ways to improve performance:

  • Using shared memory for posting really big messages.
  • Explore sharing higher level types, like ArrayBuffers.

Also worth noting that extension itself can optimize by sending less messages. While this is valid for all systems, the fact that messages are in the control of the extension and it can evaluate code in JavaScript environment might enable better optimizations.

Current implementation overview (2013-06-10)

See https://github.com/otcshare/crosswalk/tree/extensions/src for the code. Extensions are in src/extensions.

We currently implement only builtin extensions that run on the browser process. The plan is to cover also external extensions in another process as the work progresses.

Browser process

  • XWalkExtension interface: the messaging interface implemented by extensions. We have one example which is the BracketsExtensions that implements some of brackets.fs.* functions.

  • XWalkExtensionHost object: used by Crosswalk to manage the extensions and dispatch its messages. Once extensions are registered with it, notify the renderer process about and pass the JavaScript APIs of the extensions to renderer process.

  • Changes to XWalk: XWalkContentBrowserClient, to create the host and extensions, then register then.

Renderer process

  • XWalkExtensionRendererController object: keeps track of which extensions were registered, as well as its JavaScript APIs (so they can be loaded by RenderViews). It currently also bootstraps a v8::Extension that contains the code for xwalk.* functions (see below).

  • XWalkExtensionRenderViewHandler object: associated with each RenderView, handles the message exchange between JavaScript and the browser process. It is also responsible for installing the JavaScript API for each extension.

  • Changes to XWalk: XWalkContentRendererClient, to create the controller and to notify it when a render view was created.

JavaScript code

  • xwalk.postMessage(extension, msg) JS function allows the JavaScript to send a message to a certain extension.

  • xwalk.setMessageListener(extension, callback) JS function allows to register a function to listen for messages from extension.

  • In many cases, the idea is that extensions exposes JavaScript APIs that encapsulate the message passing.

How will extension process be implemented?

The idea here is to have Browser Process create a new process for handling extensions and acting as man-in-the-middle between the renderer process and the extension process. Chromium has machinery for spawning new process that we should be able to use.

We don't plan to run that extension process sandboxed, since its goal usually is to talk to the system directly in ways we couldn't predict.

How will external extensions be implemented?

External extensions are detailed in its own page, in this wiki page.

How could synchronous messages be implemented?

We could build upon existing IPC mechanism for synchronous messaging, and add a new HandleSyncMessage() operation to the interface. In the ideal scenario we should be able to

While this is possible, is not something we are currently targetting.

Brackets implementation

In the same branch there's a concrete implementation of a Brackets extension for some of brackets.fs.* APIs. The extension is in src/brackets is divided as such:

  • BracketsExtension implements the xwalk extension interface. Right now there's a very naive message and callback dispatcher, but enough to show how the system works.

  • brackets_platform.h and brackets_platform_gtk.cpp are the implementations of the functionality with platform specific code. This code was mostly reused from the previous prototype of extensions.

  • Changes to Crosswalk:: in XWalkContentBrowserClient we create and register the extension with the XWalkExtensionHost.

As the other features are implemented, the goal it to make that brackets extension an external extension.

We are also working in the Native Menu functionality needed by brackets, that we want to provide as a builtin xwalk.* extension.

Characteristics of this approach

  • It complements other proposals so far: once we have knowledge and the Chrome Extension machinery is decoupled from Chrome Browser, we might be able to reuse some of its classes. Once NPRuntime proposal implementation is available, we can extend the current extension interface with NPRuntime capabilities.

  • It's a very non-intrusive implementation, all the code is in a separate directory/namespace and there are three entry points in all Crosswalk code. It shouldn't cause problems to other on-going efforts.

  • It'll allow us to build requirements for the future changes, by showing working versions of Brackets, webruntimes and other applications, with their extensions early, we can make sure we have the proper testing scenarios for future solutions.

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