[webkit-dev] How to use webkit ?

[Brent Fulgham]

Hi,

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 12:57 PM, Nemix <ereas_dre at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hmm I haven't Mac OS, I have Windows and can't develop on Mac at
> the moment (... and maybe never for this project ...). And XCode seems
> not to be available for Windows.

I'm a little confused by your requirements (perhaps this is just a
language issue?)

I thought you had originally said you were targeting Mac OS X and the
iPhone for your software.  If so, I'm confused why you are wishing to
do the development on Windows.

So, let's assume I misunderstood, and you wish to develop something to
run on Windows, OS X, and the iPhone.  In this case, your best bet (as
of today) is probably to investigate the Qt tool chain.  I believe
this is somewhat expensive (~ $3,500 per seat IIRC), but certainly a
good deal if you wish to deploy simultaneously on multiple platforms.

WebKit is not currently available for use on Windows with an
Objective-C interface.  No one (to my knowledge) has built it using
GNUstep or a similar Objective C infrastructure.  As far as I know,
Apple itself builds Safari on Windows using C++ and COM calls to
interact with WebKit.

You might look into the Cocotron project, which supposedly provides a
way to build applications on Mac OS X and deploy them on Windows, but
I don't think it's a polished distribution ready for end-user
development.

> If I develop my application for iPhone thanks to documents, tools and
> videos on this page : http://developer.apple.com/iphone/
> Will my web application run for Mac OS at 100% ? I am not sure about the
> answer... so I prefer to ask a confirmation  ;)

The iPhone SDK is current under NDA, so details can't be discussed.
However, I think it is safe to say that (even if it was possible) to
take an iPhone application and plunk it down on a Mac OS desktop to
run it, you would probably not end up with a good user interaction.
Consider that the iPhone doesn't seem to provide a means to cut/paste
between applications, storage seems to be sandboxed so applications
can't "see" each other's data, etc.  Most users expect to be able to
pass data to and from programs on the desktop.

Having a Cocoa application is probably a good first step to getting
something running on the iPhone, but I don't think it's realistic to
hope to build one binary and run it in both places.

-Brent