[webkit-gtk] Arbitrary GObject exposition in a WebFrame js context... ie. Seed and WebKitGtk

[Gustavo Noronha Silva]

Hey,

On Tue, 2011-07-26 at 10:44 +0200, Alexandre Mazari wrote:
> Thinking along this line, it occurs to me that such a mecanism might
> prove interesting within webkit-gtk both as an API user and a contributor.

Yes, I think it would be very, very useful. I even tried to discuss this
year back or so, you may remember, but it didn't get far =(.

> The HTML5 FileSystem specification looks like a good candidate to be
> implemented in this way.
> (http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/file-system/pub/FileSystem/).

No, that sounds like a very bad idea to me. It means we will be putting
the nicely structured WebKit implementation aside and replacing it with
a potentially buggy and (maybe even only subtly) incompatible
implementation.

I'm very pro giving the API users the power and ease of use of seed for
exposing GObjects in their WebViews, hopefully with separate security
domains of sorts, but I think we would be shooting ourselves in the foot
if we started implementing DOM APIs ourselves with GObjects.

> even a full application UI, see SeedKit ;)

I have actually done this myself as a test; I wrote a patch to seedkit
which is probably in bugzilla still, that allows you to initialize seed
with an existing JSCore context. And I then used GObject APIs from
inside my web application.

> The idea is already implemented by Qt and Apple ports
> http://doc.qt.nokia.com/latest/qwebframe.html#addToJavaScriptWindowObject
> http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/AppleApplications/Conceptual/SafariJSProgTopics/Tasks/ObjCFromJavaScript.html

Similar API would be good to have, yes.

> Still, some restructuration might be needed to make the imported Seed
> code a bit more flexible and hardened security-wise.
> 
> Would such an addition be worth ? Have some brain cycle to share ?

I think we could start small, just providing APIs similar to those
available to Qt, so a way to have applications add GObjects to the
window object, and maybe a way to expose all libraries too, with a huge
warning saying this should not be done to WebViews that might access
untrusted content.

Then when we better understand the security functionality that is made
available by JSC we can improve on that and provide more granular and
sophisticated APIs.

Thanks for looking into this =)

Cheers,
-- 
Gustavo Noronha Silva <gns at gnome.org>
GNOME Project