[webkit-help] Question about usability of WebKit

[Brent Fulgham]

Hi,

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 1:56 AM, jeroen clarysse
<jeroen.clarysse at telenet.be> wrote:
> - 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 :-(

The Apple Developer Connection site has several Xcode-based example
applications.  A good one to start with is probably the CallJS example
(http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/samplecode/CallJS/).  A year
or so ago I ported this as an MFC application (most current version at
http://whtconstruct.blogspot.com/2009/06/calljs-updated.html).

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

You cannot redistribute the support libraries used by Apple with their
port of WebKit.  This includes ports of CoreFoundation, CFNetwork, and
CoreGraphics to Windows.  You can use the redistributable WinCairo
port of WebKit, either by building it from the WebKit sources, or by
using Appcelerator Titanium project.  I think there's a Sourceforge
project that uses the WinCairo port but I don't have the link
available at the moment.

> - 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 ?

I think Cocoa is the easiest approach.  There's even an example Cocoa
app that lets you build a "web browser" in three lines of code.

If all you need to do is display an application frame with WebKit
sitting in the middle, Cocoa is a piece of cake.

I'd invest the time to learn Cocoa -- it's easy, fun, and well worth it.

-Brent