[maemo-developers] Hybrid Web/Python apps with gtkmozembed

[From: Hannes Wallnoefer]

Hi there,

I spent a few days working on a Maemo Python app that embed mozilla
via gtkmozembed. This ITT posting has a short description and
screenshots, source and debian packages are available on the linked
page:

http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showpost.php?p=150211&postcount=40

Since libgtkmozembed packages are now in the maemo chinook repository,
all that is missing is the python binding for gtkmozembed, which is
part of the gnome-python-extras package. Thankfully, Owen Williams had
already built this for maemo [1], and also helped me build it myself.

[1] http://ywwg.com/maemo/

The good: Although the gtkmozembed API [2] is rather coarse, it is
possible to have two-way communication between gtk/python and
javascript running in the browser quite easily. For python to
javascript, simply send "javascript:foo()" URLs to the browser like
bookmarklets do. Javascript to python is a bit more tricky. What I do
is open URLs like "http://cmd/dosomething#arg" from javascript, and
catch them in a python function bound to the browser's "open-uri"
signal [3]. So it's really possible to have both worlds integrated
seamlessly.

[2] http://www.pygtk.org/pygtkmozembed/class-gtkmozembed.html
[3] http://www.pygtk.org/pygtkmozembed/class-gtkmozembed.html#signal-gtkmozembed--open-uri

And now the bad: the embedded browser is not hildonized. At least I
couldn't get the virutal keyboard to pop up by clicking into a HTML
form input field. Also, scrolling via dragging did not work. Do these
features have to be enabled by some init code, or are they implemented
on top of libgtkmozembed? What amount of work would be involved to get
a fully hildonized embedded browser widget?

I think that hybrid GTK/Web apps have a lot of potential. I'd love to
have this well supported on maemo!

hannes