Re: why gnustep doesn't have a browser for it?

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

as you cite my own blog, I feel compelled to write. I thought that blog post
was clear, but apparently it is not. Also, if you check later blog news, you
will see that SimpleWebKit and Vespucci made a certain, albeit slow,
progress compared to more than a year ago.

You are correct: there are two distinct things to develop: the engine and
the browser itself. Historically the two things have been tied together, but
in recent years some engines are reusable.

SimpleWebKit is a from/scratch implementation of a an engine and it adheres
as much as possible to the WebKit API, aiming to be a drop-in replacement.

Vespucci is a browser being developed on Macintosh and GNUstep to use a
WebKit-compatible engine.

As I already have written, you can compile Vespucci on Cocoa against WebKit
or SimpleWebKit just by changing the target in XCode: it will materially
just use one or the other Framework.

I think this setup is very interesting and has many advantages
1. it allows the parallel development of Vespucci without needing to wait
that SWK is complete
2. it allows to compare WebKit and SWK under the same condition and thus
discover where SWK does not follow correctly the WebKit API
3. it will allow in the future, if somebody will port WebKit to GNUstep or
write even another engine compatile with its API, to run Vespucci against
WebKit on GNUstep or another engine
4. it will allow to use SimpleWebKit on the Macintosh, this could be of
interest if some advantages arise

in any case, you see the current setup leaves a lot of freedom. The only
thing which I miss is Gecko, which I consider a heavy but high-quality and
industry-standard engine. Using gecko - once ported/wrapped to gnustep -
would require the usage of a different API or some sort of gecko to
WebKit-api wrapper.

Currently I welcome our choice, which comes from Nikolaus Schaller, because
after all GNUstep (and myStep) are close cousins to OpenStep and Cocoa, so
following their API makes sense.

Given that, I like the idea of SimpleWebKit a lot, for technical and
philosphical reasons. As you also can see, no time put in Vespucci is wasted
and a copmlete SimpleWebKit will jsut give more freedom of choice.

A GNUstep browser won't happen in a day and there are many places where help
is needed..

Regards,
 Riccardo



----- Original Message ----- 
From: <gildororonar@mail-on.us>
To: <discuss-gnustep@gnu.org>
Sent: Friday, May 08, 2009 11:20 AM
Subject: why gnustep doesn't have a browser for it?


I recently learned about GNUStep from blog "Why Did GNUstep Never
Really Take Off?" <pinderkent.blogsavy.com/archives/134#> and begin to
study and try it a bit.

I am trying to figure out why gnustep does not have a browser yet. I
searched google and found this blog post explain current progress of
browser development:

http://multixden.blogspot.com/2008/01/browser-and-webkit-progress.html

The general impression I get is "wait, there are still a lot of things
to do before you can use a GNUStep brower".