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  WebKit Ported to Qt 4
Konqueror Posted by George Staikos on Tuesday 11/Jul/2006, @12:26
from the deja-viewer dept.
Today the KDE team announces a new project to re-synchronize our HTML engine, KHTML, with the WebKit engine. Code named Unity, the project has so far focused on porting the WebKit engine to Qt 4 with minimal changes to the existing code-base. WebKit is a derivative of the KHTML engine developed by Apple Computer Inc.

Unity-Demo showing the KDE Website

The initial work for this project was done by four KDE core developers at the KDE Four Core meeting last week in Trysil, Norway. The contributors were Dirk Mueller, Zack Rusin, Simon Hausmann, and George Staikos. The project also builds on lead-up work done over the past year by George Staikos and Maksim Orlovich, which synchronized the KDE and WebKit Javascript engines.

At this stage Unity is a research project to determine the feasibility of merging much of the KHTML work done over the past few years into WebKit. This will provide us a means to synchronizing our engines. There are no concrete plans to replace KDE's current KHTML component, which is also used by Konqueror to render HTML pages, with Unity. Any such decision will be left to the KHTML and KDE core development teams in the upcoming months. It is dependent on many factors such as our ability to keep the engines synchronized over time, our ability to produce a high-performance, stable, and complete KPart, our level of comfort with the new code-base, and our ability to come to a suitable working arrangement with the other WebKit contributors.


Unity-Demo rendering Google

With respect to the technical work, our efforts have resulted in a Qt 4 based WebKit library that is able to render a variety of web pages quite nicely. There is still a considerable amount of work to do before it can be considered a complete browser engine on our platform but the basic foundations are complete. The KDE build system, cmake, is integrated into the WebKit sources, rendering uses Qt's graphics facilities, and a simple test driver has been developed. A KDE layer will be added to integrate the engine with the desktop facilities provided by KDE as well as creating a KPart which can be loaded by any KDE application requesting a handler for HTML.

Anyone wishing to join the effort should contact the developers on the kfm-devel mailing list. Source code is accessible in KDE's Subversion repository.

For press queries about this and other KDE announcements see the KDE press contacts page.




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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.
Sharpness
by Andre Somers on Tuesday 11/Jul/2006, @13:12
It may be just the quality of the screenshots, but they look a bit vague, almost out of focus. Is the a real phenomenon (maybe due to Qt4's drawing?) or is it an artifact of the screenshots and nothing to worry about?
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Qt 4 on windows
by win on Tuesday 11/Jul/2006, @13:29
Are there plans or interests to have it run on Windows?
Because of the depency on Qt4 only it should not be so hard to port.
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khtml
by pentamax on Tuesday 11/Jul/2006, @13:36
Sounds like Webkit support will make support easier and will free ressources.
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AJAX Support?
by Devon on Tuesday 11/Jul/2006, @14:08
Please, oh, please tell me this will make Konqueror have good support for AJAX pages. If so I might just have to learn C++ and help out X-D.
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Impact on KDOM2
by Shyru on Wednesday 12/Jul/2006, @00:46
Which impact does this have on KDOM2 and KSVG2? I think KDOM2 has a really great concept behind.
Is Webkit beeing ported to that, or would we "loose" that development efforts if we would go WebKit directly/only? Can anyone involved shed some light?

Thanks!
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General question: relationships
by Andy on Wednesday 12/Jul/2006, @02:54
Sorry, but I don't get the bigger picture about the relationship between KHTML, KJS, WebKit, Unity etc.
Could someone please explain, what relies on what, and where the distinct parts are used? (A link would do as well.)
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Didn't the same guys port Gecko to Qt?
by Henning on Wednesday 12/Jul/2006, @03:13
Some time ago there were great announcements of a Qt-based Firefox but nothing happened about this exciting project. I guess we will unfortunately experience the same now :-(
I am happy if you prove me wrong...
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Gnustep
by gerd on Wednesday 12/Jul/2006, @07:38
Are there other tools like Gnustep possible to get integrated in order to reimplement the full Apple API in KDE. This would mean that we could use native Apple Webkit and could leave development to Apple.
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silly questions
by morphado on Wednesday 12/Jul/2006, @08:12
hello guys,
I am a newbie, and like newbie I like to read the commit-digest, can someone explain to me the meaning of BUZZ, and what is the difference between trunk and brunch, I know that the stable version is KDE3.5.X and the developpement one is KDE4.

and for the next kde ( aka kde4) are you going to split at last the file manager from the web browser( konqueror)

thanks
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What role is Apple playing in Unity?
by Psychotron on Wednesday 12/Jul/2006, @09:59
..well, subject says it all. Are they funding developers? Do they activly work on Unity? Or are they just taking what comes out of it...? Neither of these?
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separate browser ?
by somekool on Friday 14/Jul/2006, @03:43
call it unity, call it ksafari or kafari, but please release some new browser using WebKit. I don't know if its a good idea for KDE to switch from KHTML. but its definitely a good idea to bring a new WebKit based browser for Linux, BSD and Windows.

thanks
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Khtml loveletter
by micha on Monday 17/Jul/2006, @01:15
Konqueror is "my" browser for ages now, using it every day. I am developing web apps using konqueror first, checking other browsers later. I am convinced by its good-naturedness. I have seen other browsers fail in obscure ways, even firefox, even safari, where khtml just works fine. Note, this is addressed to khtml, not kjs.

Devs out there, keep up the good work, but don't mess things up, please. From a user's perspective, I have the impression that khtml is just fine as it is, but javascript and dom needs to catch up. So it seems as though merging with webkit is too radical as a cure. Issues can be pin-pointed quite precisely and they are already in the bugs database, I think. Don't pull out the merge sledgehammer as "the next logical step".
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WebKit is Apple not KHTML
by Tim Sutton on Monday 14/Aug/2006, @12:57
"WebKit is a derivative of the KHTML engine developed by Apple Computer Inc."

This sentance is badly worded - it makes it sound like Apple wrote KHTML. Isnt this more correct? :

"Apple Computer Inc's Webkit is a derivative of the KHTML engine developed by KDE programmers"

Just my 5c...
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Last info
by epo on Saturday 28/Oct/2006, @02:32
Since Oct-23 2006 Unity is no more on branches/work (deleted on commit 598456), but it has been imported on the official Apple repository! See http://webkit.org.
Congratulations to everyone involved, big things can now happen. ^_^
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Using Unity on non KDE platforms
by Martin Reddy on Friday 03/Nov/2006, @10:17
This is a fabulous development! We have a large Qt based app that runs on Linux (GNOME) and Mac OS X, and we're looking for a solution to embed a webbrowser in that app. I'm wondering if Unity/WebKit is the answer. Specifically:

- Can Unity run on a Linux GNOME desktop? If so, does it require running a bunch of KDE services as root first (I've compiled everything up under GNOME but am having troubles running testunity), and

- Can you use the new WebKit sources to embed a webbrowser in a Qt app on Mac OS X?

If there's a more appropriate forum to ask these questions then just let me know! Thanks.

Martin.
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