i've just learned of the existence of netsurf, and am very excited to hear of it. i've just tried running it, and i'm ... surprised by its level of functionality. i say surprised because it's well below most peoples' radar, and at the same time is damn good! perplexing...
anyway, the reason i'm writing is because, as the lead developer of the pyjamas and pyjamas-desktop project i need to be able to give pyjd users more (and easier to install) options. they're simply not c/c++ programmers: they're all python programmers. the windows users are well served by COM bindings to MSHTML (Trident) - ironically it's the free software developers that are suffering. so in 2008 i did the python bindings for webkit (two versions, one of which was based on gobject with followup auto-generated python bindings using python-gobject's codegen). pyjamas-desktop has been using both xulrunner and MSHTML successfully... for a given definition of "success". anyway, all of the free software options are deeply unsatisfactory, hence the reason why i was so excited to hear about netsurf. some clarification about what i would like to achieve, and what's needed: * what is NOT needed is "script language=python". pyjamas-desktop does NOT revolve around embedding of python *into* the web browser dot EXE applicashun. * i need to take netsurf-gtk and turn it into libnetsurf-gtk, followed then by turning it into python-libnetsurf-gtk * added to that, it must then be possible to gain access to the DOM functions (from python. all of them). in other words, the core drawing engine is embedded into a full-screen single-use window (no "URL bar", no menus, no back button, nothing) and then python is given access to the drawing engine's DOM handle. an example write-up of how it all works, in the xulrunner case, is here: http://pyxpcomext.mozdev.org/no_wrap/tutorials/hulahop/xpcom-hulahop.html anyway, i'm curious as to how far along the netsurf project is to being hackable in order to use it for python-embedded purposes like this. rather than swamp this list with something that may be utterly boring to most people i've written it up here: http://lkcl.net/netsurf/netsurf.dom.txt much of the experiences described in that draft document are based on having worked with IDL compilers and Common Object Model Technologies in samba, wine, webkit and firefox. the bottom line is that if you have the (ultimate) goal of adding javascript bindings to netsurf, it's actually not that difficult to do it in such a way that other languages can play nice, too. thoughts greatly appreciated. l.
