[dot] aKademy Hackers Port Mozilla to Qt/KDE

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1094924433/

From: Kecko Team <>
Dept: integrative-desktop
Date: Saturday 11/Sep/2004, @19:40

aKademy Hackers Port Mozilla to Qt/KDE
======================================

   Among the most exciting things to come out of aKademy
[http://conference2004.kde.org/], the recent KDE Community World Summit,
is a Qt port of Mozilla's Gecko [http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/]
rendering engine. This will give Gecko the full native look and feel of
KDE/Qt, and make it available as a KPart, where it can provide an
alternative HTML renderer for Konqueror [http://www.konqueror.org/].

     "This is the best of both worlds for KDE" said Lars Knoll of the
KHTML project.  "Integrating Gecko side by side with our existing
renderer opens a lot of doors, without any compromise of the hard work
and clean design that make KHTML what it is."

     On the night before the start of the hacking marathon, a
conversation including, among others, Ian Geiser, Lars Knoll, Dirk
Mueller, and Zack Rusin happened onto the topic of integrating Gecko
into KDE.  Lars and Zack jumped into Mozilla's code, to see how feasible
such a plan might be.  Within four days (and before the end of the
marathon) the two had a working port: Gecko running on Qt.  They
credited the speed of implementation to the maturity of the respective
technologies and KDE's component architecture (though the caliber of the
hackers certainly didn't hamper the effort).  In their implementation,
Qt is just another platform for Mozilla, parallel to the drawing and
widget layer for Mozilla's other platforms like GTK, Win32, or MacOS X. 
Though the work is on-going, the team is close to integrating Gecko into
Konqueror, connecting Gecko to the higher level browser machinery in
Konqueror such as KWallet and KCookieJar.

     The Mozilla organization was supportive: "We are delighted to work
with the KDE community, both to extend the reach of Gecko, and to be
part of an effort bringing even greater depth to the KDE desktop. 
Making Qt another platform for Mozilla, and Gecko another option for KDE
is a win for both users and developers" commented Mitchell Baker,
President of the Mozilla Foundation.

     There have been previous starts at this idea in the past. 
Trolltech's QtScape, some initial Corel work, and a Mozilla-based XPart,
foundered from lack of maintenance and little advocacy within the
Mozilla community.  The current team will be full-fledged contributors
to the Mozilla code-base, with KDE people and mozilla.org behind the
effort. The Qt port will live and develop in Mozilla's CVS repository. 
The code to embed the corresponding QWidget will live, naturally, in
KDE's repository.