[webkit-dev] WebKitGtk network backend

[Dan Winship]

Christian Dywan wrote:
> in fact Glib is a requirement, libSoup relies essentially on features
> of the GObject system. But that is already it. There are no Gnomish
> requirements on top of that, the libsoup-gnome library is optional and
> not needed for normal functionality.

Actually, libsoup requires libxml2 too (for XML-RPC support), although
it could be changed to use a native Windows XML API on Windows, if
someone wrote a patch.

But that's it, and the entire point of libsoup-gnome is that I don't
want to add any more dependencies to libsoup itself.


There is one other possible complication though; WebKit's soup backend
uses libsoup's asynchronous API, which requires there to be a glib main
loop running. That's automatically true for a gtk-based program, but
wouldn't be true for a Windows-API-based program, and I'm not totally
sure if you can run the glib main loop and still have the Windows event
loop function correctly. One possibility if not would be to run a glib
loop in another thread, although that may cause problems with callbacks
being invoked in the wrong thread and having locking/concurrency issues,
etc... (It looks like the curl port deals with the mainloop problem by
having the I/O be driven by timeouts rather than actually polling?)
Anyway, this is going to require someone who knows more about both Win32
and WebKit than I do to figure out.

-- Dan