Politics aside I’d like to summarize a bit what happened during the development of the Qt port of WebKit in the last weeks. I like technical details, so I’ll concentrate on those 
- Lars has worked like crazy to implement support for editing in the layout tests. That means we pass now a whole lot of tests that verify that the on-the-fly editing of web pages works. You can use the contenteditable attribute on HTML elements and they are fully editable in QtWebKit now.
- Holger has reworked the network job handling introducing priorities. Based on that he fixed support for synchronous downloads and ensured that during a synchronous download no async jobs are served. This is used for example for synchronous XMLHttpRequests.
- We have started going through the public API again and making comments to things we want to change and fix, in the api-changes branch in our public Git repository
- I’m reworking the context menu implementation and combining it with a nice API to retrieve QAction objects from a QWebPage. The state of these actions is maintained and you can plug them into toolbars, menus, etc. That will make it easier for developers to customize features like the context menu. Also it simplifies the KDE integration to apply KDE settings such as icons because it’s just one webPage->webAction(QWebPage::Reload)->setIcon(…); call and the action will have the right icon in the toolbar or the context menu.
- We’ve finally set up a buildbot for the Qt/Windows build of WebKit. This will make sure that compilation always works.
6 Responses to “QtWebKit Development Update”
Hi.
It’s good to hear that QtWebKit will make it easier for developers to customize context menus. I was wondering if it can be made easy for users to customize them too. By ‘users’ I mean the type of people who would write firefox extensions etc. I’d really like to see ability for those kind of applications and customizations to come to Qt/KDE webbrowsers.
Is an ‘addons framework’ within the scope of QtWebKit or should that be the responsibility of the webbrowser developer? I genuinely don’t know, but it would be great if any extension written for QtWebKit would work equally on any application using it.
Regards.
Should I now get my source code from your GIT repo, or continue using the head version of the WebKit svn repo? Also should I be using the build instructions on the BuildingQtOnWindows page?
I’m really glad to hear that you have the windows build automated. It has been frustrating in recent weeks trying to find buidable snapshots. Hopefully that is behind us.
If you want to use the branch we’re trying to stabilize then I recommending fetching the qtwebkit branch from our Git repository. Otherwise the instructions on the Wiki for building should work fine.
Hi Simon,
I’ve done my best to understand what this (WebKit) means in terms of app development, but it still eludes me. I don’t expect this to replace the rich text eninge (or should I?). Will this allow me to write UIs as HTML pages complete with JS, and have the data submitted to C++ for proccessing? What does this really get me? Oh, and my main target platform is Winders.
Hai Simon;
I was wondering that whether I can call any browser in a widget . I used the WebKit for this , it gave me a ray of hope .I am crazy to know that you had updated the WebKit. I want to know that how it can help us ? Please can you explain it in details.
Frankly speaking I want to use your WebKit for a digital signage purpose & I have to do a lots of work with that like paying flash,url,power point, text,etc.
So I need a complete help of yours kit . Simon please help me out……………& reply soon.
I am waiting for your reply.
It’s fascinating to see how this evolves. But I’m not happy to see how the forum is not very useful. Dare I ask the same question here which have been made there without an answer (http://labs.trolltech.com/forums/topic/31)?
“As far as I can see there are currently no advanced possibilities in the API (e.g. setting the HTML using a method, access to the DOM tree, access to the WebKit objects for more possibilities).”
“We would also need “setting the HTML using a method, access to the DOM tree”.”
This kind of news which I can read hear give me some hope, but I would like to know if our project can replace KHTML (and thereby the whole KDE) with a Qt based solution?