Web Server in your Browser (Chrome Apps API)

Opera offered a built-in web server in the application for quite some time called Unite. You were able to build apps and serve them up to yourself or friends remotely through your browser.<p>They just recently removed the feature from the version 12 builds. I think that it was an interesting concept but it never caught hold.

I'm a traditionalist (to me TCP connections use socket API in C) so can someone put this in context for me:<p>- could I write some JS script that runs directly in Chrome that accepts a socket connection, receives some data, sends responses and displays something in the browser?<p>- could this theoretical app be directly "deployed" from a web page on server in our LAN?<p>- does this solution help with my current situation where I have to help users poke holes into their McAffee firewall?<p>Could be useful for me since I frequently send small test utils to my team that communicate with our embedded systems via socket connections.

The operating system within the operating system.<p>It's JavaScript all the way down, folks.

This is only useful for Chrome Apps (which are meant to run locally on your machine) and will probably not be enabled for any real web surfing. Hosting HTTP on port 80 is probably the least useful real-world sample for this capability.

Ideas like crowdsourced distributed hosting now come to my mind :)

<a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pow-plain-old-webserver/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pow-plain-old...</a> (apparently discontinued)<p><a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/browser-server/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/browser-serve...</a> (not tagged to work on linux :\)

Firewalls are going to impede this from being used for widespread p2p apps. Is there a practical way to do UDP/TCP hole punching ala skype?

now can i have a rhythm-box,nautilus ..all running inside my browser :D !!