Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Tue 29th Jul 2008 18:33 UTC, submitted by Kaj de Vos
The Syllable project has reached another long-time milestone. It was always planned to factor out the web rendering engine of its web browser, ABrowse, into a library with a native Syllable View widget on top, so it can be embedded into more applications than just a web browser. Kristian Van Der Vliet did just that: building on Arno Klenke's WebCore port, he updated that and then stepped up the modularisation by creating the WebView class. He rewrote the browser on top of that and named it Webster [screenshot]. The first alpha version is available in the project's applications downloads. The latest Syllable 0.6.6 development build is required to run it, as several bugs in the system were fixed for the new browser. The next development build will have Webster included. The source code is available on the development site.
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Member since:2005-07-06
I'm not sure I understand: what is the status of this 'webview class': was-it an improvement which has been added to WebKit or is-it a fork?
WebView is a library that implements a series of native Syllable classes on top of WebCore which can be used by applications to render and control a "web view".
Maintaining a fork of WebKit is likely to be a highly time consuming task!
Yes, it would be. Simply maintaining our port is plenty enough as it is.
I understand why you're confused. To clarify, "WebKit" is two things. It is the collection of components such as WebCore & JavaScriptCore which make up the browser engine, and it is a library on top of those components which provides the API for applications to use.
However WebKit the library is not actually a fixed, solid entity: it naturally has to be specific to each platform, so for instance on OS X it is an Objective C API. So you can in fact get the entire engine without "porting" WebKit, which would really involve writing an entire version of WebKit for your platform anyway. So instead WebView is a much more simple API that does the same job that WebKit does on other platforms.
Edited 2008-07-29 21:42 UTC
Member since:
2005-07-06
I'm not sure I understand: what is the status of this 'webview class': was-it an improvement which has been added to WebKit or is-it a fork?
Maintaining a fork of WebKit is likely to be a highly time consuming task!