Adobe Apollo Uses WebKit
Posted by Maciej Stachowiak on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 3:11 amA few months ago, Adobe announced Apollo, a tool that lets you build desktop applications based on Flash and web technologies like HTML and JavaScript. A bunch of blog posts have features whizzy screenshots. This is pretty cool stuff, you can use all your web development skills to make slick looking desktop apps.
Even more exciting, Adobe has announced that Apollo will use WebKit as its HTML layout engine. Welcome to the world of WebKit, Adobe.
October 30th, 2006 at 3:46 am
It’s quite unfortunate that they decided to limit the capabilities of WebKit by disabling support for plug-ins, as far as I understand. It remains to be seen if they will also allow for SVG, or anything besides strict HTML, CSS, DOM and JS.
October 30th, 2006 at 3:53 am
Incidentally, what happened to the list of applications that use WebKit, which used to be located at: http://www.opendarwin.org/?index.php/WebKit:Applications_using_WebKit
October 30th, 2006 at 4:13 am
So that’s why Apple was porting WebKit to Windows
The choice of WebKit seems to be a good one for Adobe; it’s probably the one which has had hardware optimised transparency, etc., for longest time.
October 30th, 2006 at 4:17 am
@graouts
I suspect they did that because it’s hard to get plugins to render under your control, so that you can draw into an offscreen buffer and do transformations and effects. But this is a separate issue from SVG, WebKit supports that natively. I don’t know if they will specifically turn that off.
October 30th, 2006 at 9:11 am
[...] . Proprio ieri sul blog di WebKit è apparsa la notizia che Apollo userà come base proprio KHTML, il motore che utilizza anche Apple p [...]
October 30th, 2006 at 10:25 am
[...] vrà implicazioni importanti nel nostro futuro, informaticamente parlando. Adobe ha scelto Webkit, il motore di Safari, per Apollo, nuovissimo strumento per la costruzione di Rich Internet Application. Le RI [...]
October 30th, 2006 at 4:44 pm
First off let me say I’m really excited to join the WebKit community. I’m working on integrating HTML support into Apollo. It has been somewhat excruciating to know that we are going to be using WebCore and JavaScriptCore, but unable to get involved with the community because we could not discuss our decision publicly.
In regards to plugin support, we want to provide a consistent platform for Rich Internet Applications on all the operating systems and devices that Apollo will support. We are concerned that any given plugin is not installed on all the machines that an Apollo application may run on. In fact, most plugins do not currently run on all the operating systems ( OSX, Windows, Linux ) we plan on supporting in Apollo 1.0. We are not planning to allow the Apollo runtime to be extended by native code in the Apollo 1.0 timeframe, this includes browser plugins other than PDF and Flash.
Enabling the SVG support in WebCore is something that we are looking at, however there are several issues we have to overcome before doing it:
1. Do we have the resources to test the SVG implementation in WebCore?
2. Is there demand from Apollo application developers to support SVG in Apollo?
Same goes for other web technologies that WebCore either currently supports or will support in the future ( MathML comes to mind ).
October 30th, 2006 at 4:53 pm
Since my last post does not make this obvious:
chrisb = Christopher Brichford, Apollo Team, Adobe Systems Inc.
October 30th, 2006 at 7:23 pm
There is a demand for SVG from me, and therefore the clients I interact with… to tell you the truth, I have more of an interest in SVG than flash. Aside from front end, is there any dynamic languages or databases we can integrate with? I take it XML support at minimum? Well, I’m sure most of our answers will come in time - if there’s a place for us to send suggestions or things we’re interested in, I’d be glad to add input:) Thank you!
October 31st, 2006 at 1:02 am
Hi Chris!
From what I read, Adobe is hoping that one of the uses of Apollo will be to create mashups of Web 2.0 applications, one reason for the HTML + CSS + JS support. Off the top of my head, I can think of two great, and heavy-used, Web 2.0 applications: Google Maps (uses SVG for rendering overlays in Firefox and Opera) and the FaceBook Visualizaer (whole graph rendered in SVG). Looking at the popular Dojo toolkit, their whole graphics APIs are now based on SVG (or VML in the one browser that has no planned support SVG natively yet, Internet Explorer).
So I think these are interesting points, and a good sign of upcoming trends, to consider for supporting, and contributing to the SVG effort in WebKit.
Antoine
October 31st, 2006 at 1:11 pm
–
Aside from front end, is there any dynamic languages or databases we can integrate with? I take it XML support at minimum?
–
Yes. You can leverage any backend data source that you like. Transport mecanism can include HTTP, XML, RSS, SOAP, etc… as well as XML and Binary Sockets (and XMLHTTPRequest).
Basically, anything that you can already do in Flash or JavaScript.
–
Well, I’m sure most of our answers will come in time - if there’s a place for us to send suggestions or things we’re interested in, I’d be glad to add input:)
–
You can send input to:
wish-apollo@adobe.com
Thanks…
mike chambers
mesh@adobe.com
October 31st, 2006 at 3:44 pm
I’ve added the comments here about SVG support to some discussions going on internally here. If you get a chance, please send any thoughts or suggestions about Apollo to
wish-apollo@adobe.com. Specific use cases are very helpful to us. Thanks again for your feed back.
Chris
November 1st, 2006 at 2:19 am
[...] b-tekniikoilla ja jotka hakevat tietonsa suoraan verkosta. Teknisen toteutuksen pohjana on webkit, siis sama webbimoottori jota Applen Safari, Nokian webbiselain ja Konqueror-selain käyttävät.
[...]
November 1st, 2006 at 8:47 am
fyi,
I have posted a video of Chris’s (chrisb) session at the Adobe Max developer conference on “Leveraging HTML and JavaScript within Apollo.”
More info here:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mesh/archives/2006/11/video_leveragin.html
mike chambers
mesh@adobe.com
November 1st, 2006 at 3:23 pm
Hey Chris,
I am interested in what we have seen so far but Iwould like to see native support in Apollo. Webkit is a fine selection, but it shouldn’t be limited if you want really rich applications.
November 2nd, 2006 at 10:23 am
–
I am interested in what we have seen so far but Iwould like to see native support in Apollo
–
Native support of what?
mike chambers
mesh@adobe.com
November 5th, 2006 at 6:36 am
I’d like native SVG support in flash in general, not just in apollo. I was tasked for work to build a web-based CAD application that could render autocad floor plans as a set of objects with intelligent visualization, and ended up having to write my own SVG parser/renderer in actionscript (tied to server-side SVG generation from the source DXF in PHP). SWF files are just not well suited for the interchange of vector data, especially if one of the requirements is being able to edit the vector graphics client-side.
Plugin support for webkit in apollo is not something I think would be relevant though. I doubt the need for them would arise with the sort of applications people are likely to build on the apollo platform.
November 6th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
[...] haps the most prominent of them being OmniGroup’s OmniWeb. As reported by the WebKit blog, Adobe recently adopted WebKit for its Apollo tool. You can download and try the WebKit Nightlies from here. Gi [...]
November 8th, 2006 at 12:18 am
So how do you feel about Adobe ripping your rendering engine for Apollo and then giving their VM to Mozilla and helping the competition squash you in return?
November 8th, 2006 at 7:24 am
They didn’t donate it to mozilla. They donated it to the open source community, under a Free license, and mozilla is hosting the source code and organizing its development. It is probably even possible for the webkit devs to use the donated code for their own Javascript 2 implementation (I believe the goal here is to get a single codebase for all ECMAScript 4 languages).
November 8th, 2006 at 11:23 am
Yes, but they could have donated it to the community by giving it to WebKit as well. Instead, they gave Mozilla all the glory and are donating all the resources to Mozilla to help get it integrated. Maybe we will see it in WebKit eventually, but nothing has been announced about it yet. I assume Adobe will want to integrate it into their own WebKit based build anyway, since Apollo will want the same version of JS running inside the SWF and inside the HTML. However, does the fact that they haven’t announced that they are integrating the engine and giving the code back to WebKit mean that they are just going to integrate it and keep their changes in their private tree? I hope not.
November 19th, 2006 at 2:24 am
jezel> i think the same! hope that adobe is working for put thei ecmascript in the javascript core.
will be very strange if not.
June 17th, 2007 at 3:14 am
[...] sviluppate con tecnologie come HTML, JavaScript e Flash. Ne ho trovato traccia nel blog Surfin’ Safari, dove se ne parla perché Apollo utilizza il WebKit di [...]
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:19 pm
[...] being added to technical discussions of engine internals to announcements of WebKit being used in entirely new places. But the web is a big place, and we want to make it easier to find the many great [...]