Re: [platform-swt-dev] Browser WEBKIT style

[Christopher Deckers <chrriis@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Grant,

Thanks a lot for the information, it is very valuable as usual!

> The cross-platform API exposed by WebKit is much more core than the one from Gecko
> so consequently there isn't something comparable to JavaXPCOM available.

I see. Since you control the implementation for all platforms, do you
have plans to create a WebKit-SWT-specific API to allow things like
showing a customized popup menu when clicking on an element of a page
and such things? Are there no efforts to create a common API which to
rally?

> Chrome also uses WebKit, but it implements its own port on top which is different from the win32 port provided by Apple

If I understand correctly, WebKit is composed of a core, on which
implementors (Safari, Chrome) build a port. SWT is a layer on top of
an implementation (win32 relies on the win32 Safari port, etc).
I don't know the details, so pardon me if my question is silly :)  Was
it too difficult to rely on the core directly? Or maybe Safari/Chrome
don't have an accessible core and shipping the core with SWT was too
big?

> To do so would require Chrome's WebKit port to commit to providing a stable API for embedders

So, is a given version of SWT supposed to run with future versions of
Safari ( contrary to XULRunner which sometimes requires an SWT update
IIRC)? Will future versions of SWT work with old versions of Safari
(like the XULRunner implementations)?

I also have another question: considering that there is no new
functionality in this implementation (no object model, etc) and that
you had to create a new version for each platform, what was the
motivation to implement it? As far as I see, there was already a
common implementation (XULRunner) in addition to the default one (IE,
Firefox/WebKitGTK, Safari). Or is it to allow testing web developments
on multiple runtimes in future versions of the IDE?

Cheers,
-Christopher