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WebContainer API

webcontainers.io

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31–40 of 54 posts

Re: WebContainer API

#31

Post by kasajian »

drunkenmagician wrote: post #29

Er, I must be missing an important nuance here, can someone who understands this explain. What is the real world use case for this? I'm afraid I don't understand what this provides that either wasm or the browser sandbox does not.

Do you want to run nodejs right inside your browser without a backend? If not, then you can just ignore it.

But if you do, then this attempts to solve that problem.

If you're asking what's the use case for running nodejs in the browser? I say use your imagination.

Re: WebContainer API

#32

Post by nkko »

skeoh wrote: post #9

Short of building my own using this API, does a self-hosted Codesandbox/Stackblitz alternative exist? I love the idea of spinning up web containers within my corporate network so I can prototype applications using internal APIs.

Codeanywhere offers on-prem hosted and air-gapped workspaces supporting devcontainer.json

Re: WebContainer API

#34

Post by lxgr »

benatkin wrote: post #24
jaequery wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m also equally confused.

It's an irritating name, like PlanetScale. It both makes it sound more official (it's not official at all) and more high-tech than it is. What WebContainers doesn't do is provide container tech. WebAssembly is similar to a Docker container, so much so that Docker now supports WebAssembly. WebContainers also uses a subdomain and the browser's security model. In fact the browser is the main thing that limits what stuff…

> WebAssembly is similar to a Docker container

In what sense?

Maybe I'm thinking too much about the implementation, rather than the use cases, but to me, WebAssembly is a VM/execution environment (in the sense of the JVM, not VirtualBox), whereas Docker is a containerization solution (i.e. a way to isolate userspace environments, for both security and dependency management), and decidedly also not a VM at all.

I can see how they can be used for similar goals, in any case: "Run my binary efficiently on your generic computer without having to trust it".

Re: WebContainer API

#35

Post by lxgr »

kasajian wrote: post #31
drunkenmagician wrote: post #29

Er, I must be missing an important nuance here, can someone who understands this explain. What is the real world use case for this? I'm afraid I don't understand what this provides that either wasm or the browser sandbox does not.

Do you want to run nodejs right inside your browser without a backend? If not, then you can just ignore it. But if you do, then this attempts to solve that problem. If you're asking what's the use case for running nodejs in the browser? I say use your imagination.

I'm not familiar with node.js, but don't most JavaScript libraries already run in both the browser (including Electron) and node.js?

Is it a matter of significantly different system APIs and standard libraries, and this offers a bridge for applications expecting to run in Node, providing that environment in the JavaScript context of a browser? (Or does it actually run Node in WASM?)

Re: WebContainer API

#36

Post by MuffinFlavored »

justanother wrote: post #23
upghost wrote: post #21

Can anyone translate this from marketing speak to developer speak? I’m genuinely not sure what this is. Is this like… WASM docker in the browser or what?

"Like codepen, but node.js executing in the browser."

node.js executing in the browser with all of the browser safety restrictions?

Re: WebContainer API

#37

Post by benatkin »

lxgr wrote: post #34
benatkin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an irritating name, like PlanetScale. It both makes it sound more official (it's not official at all) and more high-tech than it is. What WebContainers doesn't do is provide container tech. WebAssembly is similar to a Docker container, so much so that Docker now supports WebAssembly. WebContainers also uses a subdomain and the browser's security model. In fact the browser is the main thing that limits what stuff…

> WebAssembly is similar to a Docker container In what sense? Maybe I'm thinking too much about the implementation, rather than the use cases, but to me, WebAssembly is a VM/execution environment (in the sense of the JVM, not VirtualBox), whereas Docker is a containerization solution (i.e. a way to isolate userspace environments, for both security and dependency management), and decidedly also not a VM at all. I can…

I'm thinking of the end product of the "Docker container", not all of the things it takes to get there. The "my binary" part is what WebContainer emphasizes, and it's somewhat impressive in how many programs it can run.

I agree WASM is more similar to the JVM but I think the JVM is pretty similar to a Docker container in a way, if you get rid of all the higher level JVM features like garbage collection, and for docker container look at the whole system and not just docker. If you have a computer with only docker installed it's easy to think of it as docker when it's really docker or containerd running on the Linux distro. Or some MicroVM orchestration.

Re: WebContainer API

#38

Post by FinalDestiny »

kasperni wrote: post #33

I like the website layout. Knowing little about Web development. Is this custom made or using some kind of framework/template?

It looks like they're loading in MDX (Markdown) for a lot of the pages

There are quite a few "static-site generator" templates that are easy to setup and customize and many of them are free to use! If I had to guess, I think they're using VitePress [1] here. Nextra [2] is also good for this kind of a website.

[1] https://vitepress.vuejs.org/

[2] https://nextra.site/

Re: WebContainer API

#39

Post by benatkin »

benatkin wrote: post #24
jaequery wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m also equally confused.

It's an irritating name, like PlanetScale. It both makes it sound more official (it's not official at all) and more high-tech than it is. What WebContainers doesn't do is provide container tech. WebAssembly is similar to a Docker container, so much so that Docker now supports WebAssembly. WebContainers also uses a subdomain and the browser's security model. In fact the browser is the main thing that limits what stuff…

s/not the sandboxing of a WebContainer/not the sandboxing of WASM/g

Re: WebContainer API

#40

Post by benmccann »

drunkenmagician wrote: post #29

Er, I must be missing an important nuance here, can someone who understands this explain. What is the real world use case for this? I'm afraid I don't understand what this provides that either wasm or the browser sandbox does not.

https://learn.svelte.dev/tutorial/introducing-sveltekit was built with web containers. SvelteKit allows developers to create server-side APIs and do server-side rendering and web containers allow those server-side components to run in the browser.
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