[webkit-dev] Q: Webkit on Windows without COM registration (as wrapped DLL only?)

[Christian Dywan]

Am Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:40:48 +0100
schrieb Thomas Brodt <thomas.brodt at porabo.ch>:

> Hi list
> 
> as far as I have learned until now, there are several ways to use
> Webkit as an embeddable component in Windows applications. Maybe some
> wise on this list could help me out with some more answers that I
> couldn't find in days googling around.
> 
> One way to use Webkit on windows is the COM component which exposes
> some COM Interfaces that can be used to drive Webkit (I use Brent
> Fulgham's cairo based port without the Apple DLLs). This approach
> seems to work quite well as far as may experiments went. However,
> this COM solution requires that webkit.dll is registered with the
> Windows OS. This may be an issue in managed environments where
> restricted users cannot register the DLL after copying it in the
> application directory, so COM won't work for them. Or if several
> copies of Webkit in different version for different deployed
> applications are installed on a system, this may lead to problems,
> because only one path can be registered for the COM component.
> 
> The alternative - that I would also prefer over a COM wrapper - would
> be a DLL with a plain C callable interface. I just can use DLLs with
> their exported functions, not compile my program with dll usage. Does
> the gtk+ port support an API that can be used that way? I assume I
> would get some kind of handle for webview instances that must be
> given to each API call.

Hey Thomas,

with regard to the gtk port:

Just have a look at WebKit/gtk/webkit/*.h for API and
WebKitTools/GtkLauncher/main.c for a simple example. The gtk port
relies on plain C interfaces, based on GObject and it is indeed common
to have a folder with a bunch of dynamic link libraries in the same
place as the application, on Win32 that is.

ciao,
    Christian