[webkit-dev] [ANN] debian packages of webkit-glib and matching pywebkitgtk

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

if anyone's interested: amd64 debian packages including the glib bindings patch:
    http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=236659

libwebkit-dev is also included, if anybody wants to do e.g. *mm c++
bindings or, poor things, perl bindings.  the build is from svn this
morning:

Repository UUID: 268f45cc-cd09-0410-ab3c-d52691b4dbfc
Revision: 36129

the strategic importance of webkit with glib DOM bindings cannot be
underestimated.  macosx developers have had ObjectiveC DOM bindings
for some time, and now the possibility of manipulating the DOM model,
to develop rich media applications (*including* - in a future release,
just to get you really excited, SVG DOM bindings).

so, webkit with glib bindings becomes, effectively, a replacement or
competitor to the following projects:

* gtk2
* qt4
* gtkmozembed (thanks to webkit's NPAPI support)
* Adobe AIR (even though Adobe AIR is also based on Webkit!)
* wxWidgets
* hippocanvas and other SVG-like applications graphics engines
  (this for a future release)

the list just ... goes on!

i say "competitor" but of course it's not: webkit-glib/gtk is a gtk
widget, and so integrates into gtk+ applications seamlessly.  the
tantalising possibility exists for webkit-qt4 to also have its own
bindings (contact me if you'd like to contract me to make that happen,
i'd be delighted to do the work).

for an example application - actually a convenient widget-set in its
own right - you might like to look at Pyjamas-Desktop:

    http://pyjd.sf.net

Full API documentation is provided, but for those people wishing to
write their own python-based rich media applications, you would do
well to avoid the hairy ball of lovely pywebkitgtk bindings (1,500
functions and 300 glib objects) and use the much simpler - and
well-documented - API that is identical to that of Pyjamas
(http://code.google.com/p/pyjamas) and is 99% identical to Google's
Web Toolkit API
(http://code.google.com/docreader/#p=google-web-toolkit-doc-1-5).  So,
if you can't find out what a function does on the Pyjamas API
documentation, look up its identical equivalent on GWT: it will do
exactly the same thing.

lastly, i just... i can't get over quite how blindingly quick webkit
is, and how much functionality there is in it. So - my hat off to
everyone involved in the project.  it's great.

l.