Google is building a Chrome app-based development environment called Spark

Google's Chromium team never ceases to amaze. Its latest project is a Chrome app-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) codenamed Spark.

The new app was first noted by developer and Google open-source Chromium evangelist Francois Beaufort. Here are his observations for the new IDE project:

• It is built with Dart, the "new language for scalable web app engineering".
• It contains a GUI widgets library powered by Polymer
• It's public on GitHub and therefore interesting for anyone who wants to know how Dart and Polymer can be used to build the next generation of Chrome Apps.

Here is the progress so far:

For those who don't know, Chrome packaged apps are written in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, but launch outside the browser, work offline by default, and access certain APIs not available to Web apps. In other words, they're Google's way of pushing the limits of the Web as a platform.

Dart meanwhile is Google's open-source Web programming language, which has an ultimate goal of replacing JavaScript. Polymer is Google's library for the Web, built on top of Web Components, and "designed to leverage the evolving web platform on modern browsers."

It's not clear if Google will actually support this Chrome App and update it on a regular basis when it's done, or it will be simply used as an example to show what is possible with the aforementioned technologies. We're leaning towards the former, but given how often Google cans projects, you never know.

You can check out the IDE and widgets user interface separately over here andhere. Clearly there is still a lot of work to be done, but then again, this is a massive undertaking.