[webkit-help] Question about usability of WebKit

[jeroen clarysse]

Thanks for your reply, Brent !

Still a few more questions though ....

- are there sample applications somewhere with XCode & MSVC projects ? I'm a reasonably trained programmer, but I really fear setting up makefiles and workspaces. I recently spent half a week just to link an application to the SDL library, which is a lot simpler than WebKit I assume. Somehow I see myself giving up on things that are fairly trivial once one has a working, compilable example ! I've been browsing the web for WebKit samples, but really good ones seem very rare :-(

- are apple licenses very though on open source academic projects ?

- i have zero knowledge of cocoa & objC, which is why I was hoping to use Carbon. But I realize that carbon is a dead-end and I have to go with the flow sooner or later. With the SDL application that I was talking about, I managed to grab the SDL XCode sample project and work my way around objC code. Since all I want to do with this next project is simply a wrapper around webkit, I think that with a working example I might get a long way. Or am I mistaken ?

thanks !

jeroen


> Hi Jeroen,
> 
> On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 7:10 AM, jeroen clarysse
> <jeroen.clarysse at telenet.be> wrote:
>> my questions however were :
>> - is webkit intended to be part of a non-web-based application ?  Can I write an app that looks nothing at all like a browser, and simply displays an internal, locked, webpage ?
> 
> Yes.  Applications like iTunes are built this way.  Several other
> applications are using WebKit internally.
> 
>> - can I load local data into that webpage ? My experiments are local files, opened, edited and saved on the users harddisk
> 
> Yes.
> 
>> - is it possible to launch my runtime (with that local file), from my webkit-based application ?
> 
> It depends on how the runtime works.  WebKit can be embedded in your
> application, so the application could invoke the runtime as well as
> host the WebKit environment.
> 
>> - can I do this cross-platform on mac & windows ?
> 
> Yes.  Mac contains WebKit as a core system component, so you don't
> have to ship it.  On Windows you have to use the WinCairo port (or
> look into Chromium) to redistribute without violating Apple licenses.
> 
>> - am i being silly and should I stick to my own custom-drawn code, and port that to Carbon ?
> 
> Don't use the Carbon UI toolkit -- it's deprecated and won't let you
> build 64-bit applications.  I think your approach sounds totally
> feasible, but will require you to maintain different application
> frames around WebKit.  The internal JavaScript/HTML/CSS will of course
> be cross-platform.
> 
> -Brent
>