Where's the official manifest.json documentation for Chrome Hosted Apps? (bookmark/shortcut apps)

Question

The simplest Google Chrome apps seem to be those that just act as a bookmark or shortcut to a Web site. They have a manifest.json that is something like this:

{  
  "manifest_version": 2,  
  "version": "0.1",  
  "short_name": "stackoverflow",  
  "name": "stackoverflow shortcut",  
  "description": "stackoverflow bookmark chrome app",  
  "icons": { "128": "img/128.png" },  
  "minimum_chrome_version":"37.0.0.0",  
  "app": {  
    "urls": [ "http://stackoverflow.com/" ],  
    "launch": { "web_url": "http://stackoverflow.com/" }  
  },  
}  

The basics of this are documented in the Getting Started Tutorial Sample and in the Create a private Chrome app page this type of app appears to be referred to there as a bookmark app.

My questions are:

• Is bookmark app is an official term for this kind of Chrome app? As I am having difficulty finding any other official place it is referred to in such a way
• Where is manifest.json fully documented? The extension manifest.json documentation does not even contain info for the app name tag, and the main manifest.json doc doesn't mention the urls, launch, and web_url elements?

The tags are fairly self explanatory and used in many tutorials all over the Web but it seems odd there is no official documentation for them, especially when app is used for more complex Chrome apps - I just want to make sure I am not somehow missing some official and more complete documentation as I am referring to this type of app wrongly.

Maybe it is simply that the code is the documentation and I simply need to find where the manifest.json is parsed in the Chromium code. I thought it was worth asking here first though, and even if I end up being told to check the code then someone might give me a pointer there to get me started.

Answer 1

The "bookmark" apps you describe are officially called hosted apps. Here you have a description of both:

Apps

Contains installable web apps. An installable web app can be a normal website with a bit of extra metadata; this type of app is called a hosted app. Alternatively, an installable web app can bundle all its content into an archive that users download when they install the app; this is a packaged app. Both hosted and packaged apps have icons in Chrome's New Tab page, and most users shouldn't be able to tell the difference between them without looking at the address bar.

The documentation for app manifest only describes the options for packaged apps. As @wOxxOm notes in the comments, the only place currently describing a manifest for a hosted app seems to be the Getting Started tutorial.