[Sugar-devel] Browse and the move to WebKit

[Lucian Branescu]

On 22 June 2011 12:54, Marco Pesenti Gritti <marco at marcopg.org> wrote:
> On 21 June 2011 23:23, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
>> 2. In order to get Browse, Help and Wikipedia up and running on
>> webkit, do you see the need for a hulahop equivalent? Or some kind of
>> sugar-level web widget abstraction? Or just direct calls into webkit.
>
> I'm not sure. I think hulahop in principle is pretty much equivalent
> to WebKitGtk + PyGi. In practice though I suspect there are going to
> be differences on the amount of code required to write something like
> Wikipedia and Help. If it's too much, people will just cut/paste the
> whole Browse, which I think we should avoid.
>
> The way I would approach it, is to first port Browse basing it
> directly on WebKitGtk. Then port Help or Wikipedia and see if it make
> sense to share code. If it's generic enough to be upstreamed we should
> try to. If it's sugar specific, adding it to sugar-toolkit would
> probably make sense (a common toolbar implementation for example?).

In my porting of Browse from hulahop to pywebkitgtk, the code got a
lot smaller. WebKit's API is in fact much nicer and much more complete
than what hulahop offers, the latter requiring direct XPCOM usage. No
need for a hulahop-webkit.



On 22 June 2011 19:02, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
> The biggest finding that came from outside this thread is that if
> Browse is to move to pygi to access webkit, the Sugar python bits that
> it uses must also be gtk3/pygi. No mixing with pygtk2 is possible. So
> we have a prerequisite on sugar (or at least parts of it?) being moved
> to gtk3/pygi first.

Just nitpicking, but gtk2/pygi is a perfectly good option as well, and
it may even work with sugar-toolkit (depending on the status of
python-gobject and sugar-toolkit). In the worst case, gtk2/pygi would
have to be used with a port of sugar-toolkit to pygi. There is no need
to bother with gtk3.

Also, it'll be much easier to move Surf from pygtk2/pywebkitgtk to
gtk2/pygi than to gtk3/pygi anyway.



On 23 June 2011 13:16, Marco Pesenti Gritti <marco at marcopg.org> wrote:
> On 22 June 2011 19:02, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
>> I think this is exciting and definitely a good area to explore, but at
>> this point I'm trying to keep it separate from the "rescue Browse"
>> operation. I outlined the reasoning here:
>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/WebKit
>
> I totally agree with you there.
>
> I would like to see a lot of experimentation with html activities
> outside the platform before we even consider integrating. There is
> just too much unknown and possibilities, the ideas in this area needs
> to be proven first.

I don't really see what integration with Sugar needs to be achieved
that isn't possible using the same APIs as any other activity. A
html/js/node equivalent of sugar-toolkit would be useful, but I don't
see any integration necessary beyond that.