I'm investigating the possibility of building a chrome app for a specific enterprise customer. This app would only be used by that customer (ie, it is not a general purpose app).
Among the use cases described on the Technical Overview are the ability to replace "Legacy desktop applications" and "enterprise applications that require heavy computation" - the solution I'm considering fits into both these gaps, as we have some mathematical libraries that we'd like to incorporate into a client-side web app.
Later on in the same document, however, it indicates that you can only deploy native client apps that are deployed on chrome webstore, as clarified by the https://developers.google.com/native-client/devguide/distributing document (and various developer scenarios).
Question: Is it possible to have build a web-app that uses Native Client, and distribute that to users worldwide, but without using Chrome Webstore (ie, using an internal server)?
Note: I've seen this document about creating a private chrome app collection on webstore, but this seems to be specific to ChromeOS. I'm interested in deploying to users that have the latest stable build of Chrome.
It is absolutely possible to run a Native Client app without hosting it on the Chrome Webstore -- otherwise, it would be very difficult to develop an NaCl app in the first place. It is possible for end users to use an NaCl app hosted on any random site. The catch is that the user needs to specifically enable the feature in their Chrome browser. It looks like the current way to enable this is to visit the "chrome://plugins/" page (or "about:plugins" page, same thing), and check the "Enabled" box under "Native Client".
Perhaps enterprise-level administration makes this easier to roll out, or perhaps allow finer-grained control so that only NaCl apps within the corporate intranet are trusted while not allowing stuff from the broader internet (NaCl is supposed to be safe and sandboxed, but Google is still playing it safe and paranoid, just in case).
For a public example of a self-hosted NaCl app, check out NaClBox, a Native Client port of the venerable Dosbox emulator. While it is also hosted in the Chrome Webstore, their support page describes how to run it directly from their site.