FSOSS

Adventures with Apple's WebKit

WebKit is an open source browser engine with an interesting history, beginning as a branch of KHTML , then secretly adopted by Apple for the Safari browser, and now enhanced as a crucial part of Mac OS X and even S60-based cell phones. We'll talk about WebKit and show how much fun it can be to have an easy to reuse web engine as part of your developer kit - and we'll build a browser or two with WebKit and Xcode, and depending on how it goes, we might wind up talking about the debugging environment as well.

WebKit is a part of the Mac OS X operating system, whose open source core known as "Darwin" is based on FreeBSD 5.0 and the Mach 3.0 microkernel. With built-in support for the X Window System, IPv6, Kerberos integration, and added POSIX, Linux, and System V API support, Mac OS X easily runs your favorite UNIX software.

Steve Hayman, Apple

Steve is a National Consulting Engineer with Apple's US Education Team, based - oddly enough - in Toronto, specializing in Apple's developer tools and UNIX core. Prior to Apple, Steve worked with that other Steve at NeXT Computer, where he first fell in love with the combination of powerful object-oriented development tools and a great Unix core; before that he was Network Manager at Indiana University; before that he picked up an M.Math at Waterloo, before that he had a summer job painting construction equipment. Steve is delighted that Apple's blend of Unix and object orientation is reaching many more users than NeXT's tools ever did, and although he enjoys a good "vi vs. emacs" argument as much as any Unix geek, he's even more intrigued with what you can do with strong OO tools and libraries. As a result Steve has built and thrown away dozens of different web browsers based on Apple's WebKit. In his spare time he directs Argonotes, the Toronto Argonauts Band, the finest band in the Canadian Football League.