[webkit-dev] use binary webkit

[Peter Kelly]

On 23/10/2011, at 10:58 PM, Eric Seidel wrote:

> This is the wrong list for this question.  webkit-help is a better
> choice for these topics.
> 
> There is no free-to-distribute version of WebKit for windows to my
> knowledge.  Apple's windows version (the DLLs from the nightly)
> requires non-redistributable libraries from Apple.  Making it
> il-suited for use with 3rd-party applications.

Hi Eric,

It seems there are a lot of people who wish to embed WebKit in their applications, but this is not simple to do on any platform I'm aware of at the moment (correct me if I'm wrong). Given the prominence of the project and the number of potential use cases for it, It seems to me that it would be nice to have something that anyone can easily distribute as part of their app, as they can do with pretty much every other open source library out there (think SQLite and libxml, which are used by many applications).

I myself am developing an application which embeds WebKit and have found it a huge amount of effort to integrate because of its current state. In my case I am developing for Android, but need to use a custom build to include some bug fixes which affect my application. This has involved porting the Android fork of the Chromium fork of WebKit to build under the NDK, which is not possible natively due to it's reliance on private APIs. Once I have it working I plan to release the port publicly (both due to the LGPL requirements and to help others who may wish to do the same thing). I also may wish to port my application to windows in the future.

While I understand that Apple and Google's priorities for WebKit lie in their respective browsers and OS APIs, perhaps there might others in the open source community and those working on various ports who would be willing to participate in an effort to make an easily-redistributable library of the nature that Atena was suggesting. I would certainly be willing to contribute to such an effort.

If I was to start a project to make this happen, and get enough interest from others, would it be possible to do this as part of the mainline webkit development tree?

--
Peter Kelly
kellypmk at gmail.com