A lot has been discussed about the differences in native apps and web apps. However, most believe that these two are eventually headed towards being converted into a single entity. These developments, though, have been taking their own sweet time with most such projects far from being ready, most noticeably in the mobile segment which is mostly dominated by native apps. On the other media and the PC, this transition seems to be moving much faster. The missing piece of the puzzle, however, is touted to be the Native Client that Google is currently working on. And if you are to believe them, it is almost ready to be launched.
To put it in the simplest of terms, the Native Client makes it possible for developers to be able to design web apps which are capable of executing their native code in the environment of the web browser on which they are opened. If this becomes practical, browsers will be able to run codes written in languages such as C and C++ along with the usual Javascript. This is going to result in the much larger possibility of being able to port applications for the desktop on the internet.
The Native Client technology, although being open source, is being given the boost by Google. Along with working for the faster development of Native Client, Google has also been driving some other innovative technologies. Pepper Plugin API being one of these, it is the evolved form of the very popular Netscape Plugin API which is used by almost all web browsers to handle plugins. The Pepper API has been developed to resolve some of the performance and portability issues which were involved with the Netscape version. Google has been putting in a lot of effort into getting a full support for Pepper.
