News from the Qt WebEngine Team
http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2014/05/13/news-from-the-qt-webengine-team/?utm_source=rssutm_medium=rssutm_campaign=news-from-the-qt-webengine-teamPublished Tuesday May 13th, 2014 | by Zeno Albisser
It has been a while since our last blog post and we would like to provide a short summary of our work and our future plans.
In the meantime, we have added several interesting features such as support for WebRTC or the system clipboard. We added support for Tooltips and Find Text to the Widgets API. Also, we spent a significant amount of time expanding our APIs and verifying these by porting example applications from Qt WebKit to Qt WebEngine.
Qt WebEngine in Action
The following video shows Qt WebEngine in action on multiple platforms. Some very exciting features shown in the video include WebRTC being used for video conferencing and WebGL and CSS animations running on embedded
linux. Further it also shows HTML5 Video running on an off-the-shelf embedded device.
Focusing on Embedded
Since last year, we have been working on getting Qt WebEngine running on Linux and Mac OS X. These are already running pretty well as shown in the video above. However, given the market requirements and the high number of requests received for web content on embedded platforms, we have had to slightly shift the team’s focus. Having a well performing, high-quality web engine is a key requirement for many embedded devices, and we want to cater to these with the upcoming release of Qt WebEngine. Therefore, in the past few months we have placed more emphasis on the embedded Android and embedded Linux operating systems that form part of Qt Enterprise Embedded.
Although, the team’s focus has moved to embedded on the short term, there is ongoing work happening to fully support
Windows.
So far we have Qt WebEngine running on the following reference devices which are supported through Qt Enterprise Embedded:
embedded Linux:
Raspberry Pi model B (Broadcom BCM2835)
Boundary Devices SABRE Lite (Freescale i.MX 6)
BeagleBone Black (Texas Instruments AM335x)
embedded Android:
BeagleBone Black (Texas Instruments AM335x)
Google Nexus 7 (Nvidia Tegra 3)
Furthermore, Qt WebEngine is also running on desktop Linux and on Mac OS X.
The work to add support for Windows is on-going.
Upcoming Releases
We will first ship Qt WebEngine with the Qt 5.3 version of Qt Enterprise Embedded coming soon. At this point, Qt WebEngine will be a Qt Enterprise Embedded only release and will include support for the embedded platforms mentioned above. We are expecting to receive a lot of feedback from our embedded users and this will help us to release an even more improved version also for desktop with Qt 5.4.
Qt WebEngine is a solid and future proof solution for Qt-based embedded devices requiring a web engine.
Support for further platforms
Support for further platforms, in particular the desktop platforms will then be added with our 1.0 release which we are currently planning to have with Qt 5.4. We are putting significant effort into easing the porting from Qt WebKit to Qt WebEngine. Qt WebKit remains supported for all desktop platforms with both Qt 5.3 and 5.4, so each application can migrate to Qt WebEngine when desired.
