With Native Client (NaCl) is it possible to embed a server in a page that can accept incoming requests?

Question

Is it possible to open a port using Native Client that other browsers can connect to? Like a browser to browser connection?

Answer 1

In general, no. NaCl does not allow programs to open sockets directly (that would be a security problem). It is intended that NaCl/Pepper applications have the same general capabilities as Javascript applications; so something like WebSockets (connection back to the server) would be supported, but not directly opening files or sockets on the client machine. There's some work going on to have a P2P style networking in HTML5 (e.g. http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-20080122/#peer-to-peer) which would likely get Pepper support as well, but I don't know what the status of that is.