EFL Port of WebKit

About EFL

The ​Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL for short) are a set of graphical libraries intended to provide easy-to-use resources for building rich user interfaces based applications. It is the core of the ​Enlightenment (E17) desktop shell and window manager. As mentioned in Enlightenment's official web site, "the libraries are meant to be portable and optimized to be functional even on devices such as mobile devices". Its core components are:

• Evas: Highly optimized raster canvas, supports software or hardware accelerated rendering
• Edje: Declarative UI library, provides rich theme
• Ecore: Event loop and utility classes to interface with system (X, DirectFB, Cocoa...)
• Eina: Basic data types

About the port

WebKit/EFL is a project aiming at porting WebKit to the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries. The port is based on Gtk's as we currently use Cairo for rendering and LibSoup for networking, just as they do.

Status

Port is being developed and maintained by ​ProFUSION and ​Samsung. An early version was started by ​INdT/OpenBossa, but it was changed significantly before inclusion in SVN (See their initial announcement at ​0.1 version (Jun/16/2009)). Current version is quite complete, featuring:

• Embedding API mostly consistent w/ Gtk, but following EFL naming scheme and conventions (such as usage of Evas Smart Objects and its callbacks);
• Theme support per Web Frame;
• Most of HTML5 features (video is missing);
• Various delegates to allow full customization of Pop-up and Context menus;
• Most of page settings (auto load images, disable flash or javascript, etc);
• Override-able input handling, allowing custom mouse and keyboard behavior;
• Override-able backing store, allows extensions such as tiled backing store or off screen rendering.

Future plans:

• NSAPI plugins, using windowless systems for integration into Evas;
• HTML5 feature completion (video, geolocation);
• Improve API coverage, exposing more features such as the Editor and Inspector clients;
• Expose DOM;
• WebKit2 support.

Other desired features:

• Elementary widget wrapping up ewk_view into a convenient widget, providing default implementation for delegates;
• Remove strict X11 dependency, allowing DirectFB and FB at least;
• Less dependency on GNOME technologies, maybe remove Cairo and LibSoup.

Getting the source

The port is being uploaded to official SVN. Right now all source files are merged, but build system is missing. Due discussions at webkit-devel, the chosen build system (CMake) might turn into the proposed "official", so discussion is taking place at bug ​#37945 (CMake buildsystem)

Development

Dependencies

Below is a list of Debian package names you will need to install.

• libicu-dev
• libxslt-dev
• libsqlite3-dev
• gperf
• bison
• flex
• libjpeg62-dev (newer libjpeg may be used as well)
• libpng12-dev (newer libpng may be used as well)
• libxt-dev
• libfontconfig1-dev
• libcairo2-dev
• libfreetype6-dev
• libglib2.0-dev (optional, required by libsoup backend)
• libsoup2.4-dev (newer libsoup may be used as well) or libcurl4-dev
• cmake

Additionally, the EFL specific packages (not officially release yet, build directly from SVN!) have to be installed.

• eina
• eet (required by edje in evas, compile it before evas!)
• evas
• ecore (with ecore-x support)
• edje
• embryo (required by edje)

See ​http://svn.enlightenment.org/.

Build and Install

• Follow the procedures to ​checkout the source code.
• Create a build directory:

  webkit$ mkdir build
  webkit$ cd build
  build$
  

• Run CMake:

  build$ cmake .. -DPORT=Efl
  

• Run make:

  make
  

• Go grab some coffee, this'll take a while.
• Install the thing:

  make install
  

Questions, feedback

If you have questions please join #webkit, #webkit-efl or #edevelop on irc.freenode.net. You may ask k-s, antognolli, acidx, demarchi, rakuco or other developer there.