The Aura Shell and Chrome Integration

A desktop environment is much more than just basic window types. We needed a playground to implement the higher level elements of the window manager, such as constraint-based moving and sizing, shell features such as the persistent launcher at the bottom of the screen, status areas, etc. Rather than build this directly into Chrome, which is huge and takes forever to link, we decided to build this as a separate component. Because it consists of UI components like the launcher and custom window frame Views, it would need to depend not just on Aura but also Views.

The product is a shell library (called aura_shell) that (eventually) we can use in Chrome when built with We also have a test runner, called aura_shell_exe. This instantiates the shell, and launches a few sample/example windows that allow us to build out and test functionality. Within the shell, models for components that would normally be populated with user data (such as apps in the launcher) come from mocked models. When instantiated in Chrome, the real data is provided.

The Chrome OS UI team has traditionally worked on many of these features and people from that team will contribute heavily to this effort.

Implementation Strategy

Since this is a complex project, there are several sub-efforts. The breakdown above covers the main areas: Compositor, Gtk-removal, Aura and the Aura Shell/Chrome Integration.