Fremont, CA — (press release excerpt) — ACCESS Systems America today announced that it now supports Trolltechs Qt/Embedded application development toolkit for ACCESS popular NetFront for Linux microbrowser. Using Qt, ACCESS customers can develop Internet applications that can easily be re-targeted to various Linux-based Internet appliances.

“Linux has become a major platform for non-PC applications, including gaming consoles, PDAs, set-top boxes and Internet appliances,” said Marty Smuin, vice president, sales and marketing, ACCESS Systems America. “By accommodating Qt support in our microbrowser we let the Linux community know that we are serious in our efforts to support Linux-based platforms.”

The port of NetFront to Qt delivers two benefits to ACCESS and its customers. ACCESS Linux microbrowser now runs on all devices that support Qt/Embedded and Qtopia, the Qt-based embedded application environment. And ACCESS customers can use Qt to develop Internet applications that run on a large number of Linux-based Internet appliances. The Qt version of NetFront for Linux will be released to the U.S. market first.

The Qt Application Development Toolkit Qt is a C++ toolkit that greatly reduces the time and resources developers need to write for multiple platforms. Qt reduces the job of porting to a simple recompilation, thereby eliminating the problems and costs of maintaining separate versions for different platforms. The Qt/Embedded version can be scaled to a very efficient memory footprint for embedded Linux applications.

NetFront 2.6 for Linux In December of 2000, ACCESS introduced its NetFront 2.6 for Linux Software Development Kit (SDK), the first to make an embedded browser available for the Linux operating system platform. NetFront 2.6 for Linux is a compact and powerful browser that is optimized for networked Internet appliances with limited hardware memory configurations. The browser kernel is less than 270 KB of code and fits in 1.3 megabytes of ROM and 2 megabytes of RAM. It supports the full HTML 3.2 specification and selected portions of HTML 4.0. It supports frames, JavaScript, cookies, web printing and multilingual capabilities.

The NetFront 2.6 for Linux SDK lets developers customize the user interface to their desired look and feel and add plug-ins tailored for specific applications. These modules, available from ACCESS, include Internet mail, Japanese language input kits, SSL capabilities, JavaTM Virtual Machine, animation plug-ins, and more.

ACCESS NetFront browser operates in resource-constrained environments on a wide variety of embedded CPUs, such as ARM cores, StrongARM cores, Hitachi's SuperH series, IBM/Motorola's PowerPC, MIPS Cores, and Mitsubishi's M32R/D series. In addition to Linux, NetFront also runs on various RTOS including micro-ITRON, OS-9, pSOSystem, VxWorks, Windows CE, and others.

Written in ANSI C, NetFront 2.6 Linux SDK is available as a full source code package. The SDK includes the NetFront 2.6 browser kernel, a sample user interface module and PIM suite, the Internet mail module, a sample library for peer interface layer and graphics layer (GTK/SDL), and documentation. An AVE-SSL, SSL version 2/3 module is optional. A free evaluation version of NetFront 2.6 for Linux is available at the company's website.

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.