altBrowser Question and MAC version of altBrowser...

[Alex Rice]

On Monday, June 16, 2003, at 10:34  PM, Trevor DeVore wrote:
> Apparently there is some web stuff available on Jaguar.  Omni Group 
> has a beta of OmniWeb that uses WebCore and JavaScriptCore frameworks. 
>  I am not familiar with these but take a look at the article at 
> http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2003/06/05/omniweb/

Yep I've been following that on the cocoa-dev mailing list too. I've 
attached an interesting post.

I'm not able to go to WWDC, I just really want to root for Chipp, Chris 
and Tuviah. altBrowser is so cool, and if it could run on MacOS 
versions as well it would be simply amazing. Can you develop one for 
Linux and BSD too? Safari's KHTML after all came from KDE project :-)

--

  From: Greg Titus <greg at omnigroup.com>
Date: Thu Apr 10, 2003  11:22:15  AM America/Denver
To: Daryl Thachuk <darylt at wrx-ca.com>
Cc: cocoa-dev at lists.apple.com
Subject: Re: WebCore revisted
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.551)

On Thursday, April 10, 2003, at 10:04  AM, Daryl Thachuk wrote:
>
> Since Omni has now started using WebCore in OmniWeb has anyone else 
> had success in using WebCore? Or did Omni get special secret help from 
> Apple in integrating WebCore in OmniWeb.

No, we did not get special secret help, we just put a lot of effort 
into it. Here's a thread from the MacNN forums that talks about this.

Tim:
> I wouldn't exactly say we reverse engineered it, but we did spend 
> about a month (in fact, we still are) researching various ways of 
> interacting with WebCore in a stable, efficient manner.  The problem 
> is that although KHTML has some fairly extensive documentation, there 
> is little to no documentation for WebCore.
>
> The plan right now is to continue to use our own layer over WebCore 
> instead of using Apple's upcoming Safari SDK (WebKit, WebFoundation).  
> Among other things, this allows us to make bug fixes and 
> customizations at our own pace instead of waiting for Apple to do it 
> for us.

Rick:
>> When WebCore was first released quite a few cocoa programers tried to 
>> build an application around it and ran into a ton of difficulties. 
>> I'm assuming that Omni figured out these issues and reverse 
>> engineered the bridge that takes the layout from khtml and makes it 
>> an actual view.
>
>
> Part of the problem was that the first attempts people made to use 
> WebCore sort of assumed it was a complete "web engine". It's not -- it 
> expects to be plugged into something greater which provides text 
> layout, image rendering, integration into the NSView hierarchy, etc, 
> and as Tim2 notes, the procotols for doing this weren't documented. 
> But again, it's hard to call the process of figuring out how to use 
> that "reverse engineering" since WebCore is open source.
>
> To further elaborate on Tim2's comments: Apple's forthcoming Safari 
> SDK (WebKit/WebFoundation) is expected to be closed-source. This will 
> be fine for everybody who wants to embed an HTML viewer as a "black 
> box" within their app... but we're making a full-featured web browser. 
> In order to distinguish ourselves from the competition we need the 
> freedom to enhance functionality and add innovative features in any 
> part of the software, and we can't do that with a "black box". 
> Features like the cookie filtering and zoomed form editor we've 
> brought forward from 4.2 to 4.5 would be much more difficult without 
> being able to modify the "engine" parts.

Hope this helps,
	- Greg
_______________________________________________
cocoa-dev mailing list | cocoa-dev at lists.apple.com
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives: 
http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/cocoa-dev
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.




Alex Rice, Software Developer
Architectural Research Consultants, Inc.
alrice at ARCplanning.com
alrice at swcp.com