A project I've been working very hard on has finally come to fruition: the ViewML open source browser. It's specifically targeted towards resource-constrained Linux based embedded systems and Internet Appliances. I thought I'd share a little behind-the-scenes info about why we did it, what we're trying to accomplish, and its current status.

As the maintainer of Microwindows as well as the chief strategist for MontaVista's gui strategies, I've been giving talks around the country for the last three months, showing Microwindows' architecture, talking about the new micro-X build in Xfree86, and other developments. At the end of each of the talks, I'm constantly beseiged with requests for a good open source browser that could run on these systems and not use much memory. I would talk about Opera, which is compact and closed source and runs on X and Microwindows but is not released yet, and mention Netscape/Mozilla, which is open source but huge, but I realized that there really wasn't an optimal solution for embedded systems.

So I created one. With the backing of MontaVista and Century Software (my company), we've now created the first release (v0.1) of a truly open source embedded Linux browser, ViewML.

We evaluated most all open source HTML display widgets looking foremost for high-quality HTML display, and secondly, being somewhat small and well written. We came up with KDE's kfm widget as the best choice. It is extremely well written, but expects the Qt widget set underneath. Qt is too large. We wrote a thin glue layer that translates Qt calls into FLTK calls (both toolkits are written in C++). FLTK was chosen because it is quite small, and most importantly runs on both X and Microwindows (we're using the Nano-X multiple client/server API). We then wrote a very thin user interface (this needs more work) that allows
a user to operate the display engine, essentially.

We initially thought that we had about another 5 days to put some more polish on the rev 0.1 source, but the story is hot and people want to know about it. The current 0.1 release is quite rough, and still has some issues relating to url parsing. We should have some screen shots up later today. Additionally the 0.1 release has a minor uncaught X dependency that prevents its proper linking with Microwindows. These issues will be fixed over the weekend and made available as another tarball on Monday. We're also going to be bringing up a CVS next week.

We feel very good about the HTML engine display capabilities and small RAM usage of the design. There's going to be a bit of work figuring out the best way of allowing customization of this browser. For instance, it's well suited for 320×240 screens because of it's lack of many user interface features, but we'll want to add more buttons/functions for use on a web pad. So we're open to discussion on how this should be designed for maximal use by the open source community.

We've started a mailing list for ViewML. Details are on the web site.

Regards,
Greg

Related story:
Microwindows project leader 'drops the other shoe'

 
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