[webkit-dev] how tightly coupled is JavaScriptCore to WebKit?

[Geoffrey Garen]

Brett,

While the WebKit framework requires the JavaScriptCore framework to  
build, WebKit is not tied to JavaScript as language in any  
particularly strong way. I don't think it would be too difficult to  
make a Python-enabled prototype by adding new hooks inside the engine.

That said, I seem to remember that a contributor already added Python  
support to DumpRenderTree, our test harness for WebKit, using PyObjC.  
WebKit's ObjC bindings make this kind of addition pretty painless. I  
think you'll find this approach far easier than hacking inside any  
browser engine, since it allows you to avoid the engine guts  
entirely, and use only public, documented API.

Cheers.

Geoff

On Jul 31, 2006, at 4:54 PM, Brett Cannon wrote:

> My name is Brett Cannon and I am currently a Ph.D. student  
> attending the University of British Columbia.  I am starting work  
> on a dissertation that involves making the Python programming  
> language secure and using the use of Python as a client-side web  
> scripting language as the case-study.  I was originally planning on  
> using Firefox as the browser to embed into, but then I remembered  
> that WebKit was an option for me.
>
> But I have no clue how difficult it would be to add another client- 
> side scripting language to WebKit.  Does anyone know how difficult  
> this would be?  Is most stuff so completely geared towards  
> JavaScript that adding another language would be a huge  
> undertaking?  Or is the abstraction at the right level that this  
> would be feasible with a modest amount of work?
>
> Thanks for any help.
>
> -Brett C.
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