On Jun 7, 2005, at 5:13 PM, Kevin Ollivier wrote:
First off, I wanted to say I'm really impressed with Apple's commitment to open source. IMHO, the actions you've taken go above and beyond the call of duty and show an openness that few companies are willing to risk.
Thanks for saying so. I think all the great testing and code submissions we have been getting will really help people at Apple and other companies to understand the strength of the open source development model.
However, I do have more to say than that. :-) Vaclav Slavik (the author of wxWidgets' wxHTML support, among many other things) and I have embarked on a rather ambitious project, which is the development of a wxWidgets implementation of WebCore. I do recall one of the developers saying they'd be open to/interested in a multi-platform WebCore. ;-) We'd also like to develop an ActiveX front end as well, so that apps outside of wxWidgets apps on Windows can take advantage of WebCore. We've been working on it for a couple weeks now and we have setup a SVN repository for it at:
http://developer.berlios.de/projects/wxwebcore
We've still got a long ways to go, but we've gotten a fair amount of files compiling these past couple weeks (both on Mac and Linux) and hope within a month or so that we can move towards a basic prototype.
Hey, that's great news. We're definitely interested in ports to other platforms, and we'll be working to restructure our tree to make this feasible. We want to make kwq into a true multiplatform porting layer which can adapt to multiple operation systems and GUI toolkits.
Related to this project, I had a couple questions for WebKit developers:
1) We have a patch for JSCore 412 that includes some simple compilation fixes like added headers and such to get it to compile on Linux. Are you interested in this, and if so, do we just submit it to the WebKit bugzilla?
Sure, we'd love to see these changes. The very best way to do it would be to file an appropriate bug in bugzilla, attach a patch, and send email to webkit-changes when it's ready for review. If the patch is large and covers multiple separate issues, then splitting it would help a lot.
2) Is the WebKit site and mailing list going to be the primary discussion and project space for WebCore as well now? As WebKit is a superset, I wasn't sure if this was more appropriate here, or if WebCore's discussion forum was a more appropriate place.
Yes, this list is going to be the main forum for discussion of WebKit, WebCore and JavaScriptCore development.
Anyways, the newly open-sourced WebKit will definitely help us in our implementation, and I hope that our work can be useful to the WebKit development team as well. It will certainly be of great benefit to the wxWidgets project!
Cool, we sure hope it helps, and we'd totally be happy to see your work in our tree. Regards, Maciej