Professional HTML5 Mobile Game Development

Packaging Your App for the Google Chrome Web Store

The Google Chrome Web Store is an online marketplace for both free and paid web applications and is available at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/.

The applications in the Google Chrome Web Store are what Google calls “installable web apps.” Put simply, they are just normal web apps that have been configured to work as Chrome extensions and that can be installed via the Chrome Web Store.

The Web Store supports two different types of apps: hosted apps and packaged apps. Hosted apps are just normal web apps that have been submitted to the Web Store with a little bit of additional meta data. Packaged apps, on the other hand, are downloaded to the user’s computer and can be used offline without any additional work. Hosted apps can also be used offline if they are configured to properly use an application cache manifest.

Creating a Hosted App

Creating a hosted app for the Chrome browser for testing purposes is as simple as creating a directory with the required manifest and icon and then loading it as an unpackaged extension from within Chrome.

To walk through the required steps, you turn the Alien Invasion game, hosted on github pages at http://cykod.github.com/AlienInvasion/, into a hosted app.

First, create a new folder called invasion-app. Next, create a manifest.json file in that directory with the contents of Listing 27-1.

Listing 27-1: Invasion app manifest.json

{ "name": "Alien Invasion", "description": "Save the world, you ...