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

[From: tonikitoo (Antonio Gomes)]

Hi,

> 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?



This "hildonization" (vkb handling) is implemented in another microb
layer, microb-eal (see
https://garage.maemo.org/svn/browser/mozilla/trunk/microb-eal/src/gmozillaengine.c).

instead of straight using gtkmozembed , you could maybe use
browser/microb-eal to access browser functionalities.


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

Absolutely.

regards

-- 
--Antonio Gomes