I’ve been workin’ on the WebKit all the live long day …
… WebKit for Neutrino 6.4.0 that is
Lots has gone on since my last post on SRR. After finishing up my parental leave last year I decided that after working at QNX for nearly 10 years it was time for a change and took on a role at Crank Software.
We’re doing a lot of interesting things at Crank, mostly to do with graphics and improving the way people integrate graphical content into their embedded products.
Crank is doing a lot of work with customers who base their user interface designs on what Apple’s iPhone and iTouchcan do, but want to do it on systems with less powerful CPU’s, smaller memory capacity and less capable graphics engines.
Oh yeah … and for those devices that are network connected they also want to run WebKit, the engine under Apple’s Safari web browser.
As part of addressing these needs (better, faster, smaller) Crank has ported WebKit to QNX Neutrino, and since web browsers and graphical applications go hand in hand these days, we plan to provide assistance and support on this technology.
If you are keen, you can try out an advance pre-release version of the WebKit engine by downloading it from http://www.cranksoftware.com/pre-release/.
This is a snapshot of our development from a month ago after we got the initial port running and passing the basic browser tests, lots of improvements have been made since then and we’ll update it when we hit a good stability point.
Our initial ports run on both Neutrino 6.3.2 and 6.4.0. We currently have Photon microGUI versions and expect to have an AGTDK based version out in the coming weeks.
The development on WebKit is very active, with lots of work going on in all areas from user interface to scalability to scripting performance. Getting the initial port up and running wasn’t a trivial amount of work, and we hope to work with the WebKit developers to back port our changes.
In the mean time, if you run Neutrino and wanted to be like all the other cool kids out there running WebKit go check out the pre-release and let us know how it works for you!
Thomas
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Great work. I’m really looking forward to see this running on a real QNX target.
Are you also planning to release the sources of your port?
@Daniel, indeed we plan to incorporate as many of the changes back to the community as possible … and are also working with QNX to get some of the QNX specific bits up on Foundry27.
Stay Tuned!
Thomas (sorry .. original reply never showed up!)
[...] 7, 2009 Filed under: QNX | I spent most of the past week doing some performance tuning on the port of WebKit to QNX Neutrino that Crank Software is doing. There are lots of different tools I could use but nothing beats the [...]