nanogui@linuxhacker.org

A project I've been working very hard on has finally come 
to fruition: The ViewML Project's open source browser
targetted specifically towards embedded Linux systems
and Internet Appliances.  www.viewml.com

I thought I'd share a little behind-the-scenes info about
what's been going on and what we're trying to do.  As the
maintainer of Microwindows as well as the chief strategist
for MontaVista's gui strategies, I've been giving talks around
the country for the last three months, showing Microwindows'
architecture, talking about the new micro-X build in Xfree86,
and other developments.  At the end of the talks, I was always
beseiged with requests for a good open source browser that
could run on these systems and not use much memory.  I would
talk about Opera, which is closed source but runs on X and
Microwindows (not released yet), and mention Netscape/Mozilla,
which is open source but huge.  I realized that there really wasn't
a solution.

So I created one.  With MontaVista and my company Century
Software's backing, we've created a first release v0.1.  We 
evaluated most all open source HTML display widgets looking
foremost for high-quality HTML display, and secondly, being
somewhat small and well written.  We came up with KDE's kfm 
widget as the best choice.  It is extremely well written, but expects 
the Qt widget set underneath.  Qt is too large.  We wrote a thin
glue layer that translates Qt calls into FLTK calls (both toolkits
are written in C++).  FLTK was chosen because it is quite small,
and most importantly runs on both X and Microwindows (we're
using the Nano-X multiple client/server API).  We then wrote
a very thin user interface (this needs more work) that allows
a user to operate the display engine, essentially.

We initially thought that we had about another 5 days to put
some polish on the rev 0.1 source, but the story is hot and
people want to know about it.  The current 0.1 release is
quite rough, and still has some issues relating to url parsing.
We should have some screen shots up later today.  Additionally
the 0.1 release has a minor uncaught X dependency that prevents
it's linking with Microwindows.  These issues will be fixed over
the weekend and made available as another tarball on Monday.
We're also going to be bringing up a CVS next week.

We feel very good about the HTML engine display capabilities
and small RAM usage of the design.  There's going to be a bit
of work figuring out the best way of allowing customization of
this browser.  For instance, it's well suited for 320x240 screens
because of it's lack of many user interface features, but we'll want
to add more buttons/functions for use on a web pad.  So we're open
to discussion on how this should be designed for maximal use by
the open source community.

We've started a mailing list for ViewML, details are on the
web site.

Regards,

Greg