Project: Konqueror/Embedded for Qtopia

[Eva Brucherseifer]

Hi everybody,

I am glad to announce, that basysKom (my company) concluded a contract to port 
the current version of Konqueror/Embedded based on KDE 3.5 to Qtopia PDA 
Edition 2.2 (based on Qt 2.3.12) and to add a customized GUI with a number of 
additional features. 

The whole source - also the new GUI - will be placed under a free licenses 
(LGPL and GPL) and we want to develop in close cooperation with the KDE 
community. The goal is, to not develop a dead end product, but to make sure 
the efforts will be reused.

Here are the features we are going to implement until end of March are the 
following:

- Port to Qt2 & Qtopia, as necessary fix font handling, encoding detection, 
alpha blending for Qt2
- GUI framework for the special display design (640x240, landscape) 
- persistent cookies, accept all cookies automatically
- tab-browsing (as multi-windows) and popup management
- url line with history, persistent history
- web search input line
- security indicator
- full screen mode
- bookmark management 
- persistent self-signed SSL certificates
- dialog for certificate management
- proxy configuration dialog
- image zooming
- prefetching of scripts (delayed loading of images)
- mimetypes & download manager 
- performance and stability improvements for IO scheduler (optimized for GPRS 
=> many http requests in parallel)

Currently Konqueror/Embedded is developed in the kdenox module in SVN. It 
works together with the current version in the 3.5 branch. In order to 
compile Konq/E a script is applied which copies over a number of files, 
patches some of them and further more there exist dropin replacements. 

The whole development setup is somewhat difficult, because we have to deal 
with different Qt versions in parallel and also the desktop/embedded 
environment which is based on patches. We want to suggest the following 
setup:

- we continue to work with the 3.5 branch of kdelibs, as it is mostly stable
- we develop new features for the 3.5 version of Konq/E first. This allows us 
to copy over code from konqueror and to adapt it. 
- for the qt2 port we generate a set of compat implementations to minimize 
#ifdef-ed code and a series of patches for the kdesrc code. We are doing an 
initial port right now. 
- for easier development, we suggest to generate a kdenox branch. This way we 
don't interfere with other people using kdenox. Into this branch we would to 
check in the complete sources (also the one copied from kdelibs). From there 
we would create patches for the current version of kdenox.
- wrt the GUI implementation and most of the GUI features we are not sure yet. 
I wonder of how much use this is to other users of Konq/E. Either we create 
an alternative src directory. Maybe it's ok to just have another mainwindow.

Any feedback welcome.

Greetings,
eva


-- 
Eva Brucherseifer
General Manager

basysKom GmbH
Robert-Bosch-Str. 7 | 64293 Darmstadt | Germany
Tel: +49 6151 3969-961 | Fax: -736 | Mobile: +49 170 5533642
eva.brucherseifer at basyskom.de | www.basyskom.de