How to roll out your own Javascript API with V8 | Hacker News Reader

How to roll out your own Javascript API with V8

syskall.com

57 pointsolalonde8 comments

Tip: to make V8 startup and context creation significantly faster add 'snapshot=on' to your scons command line. This serializes the default heap during compilation and quickly deserializes it on startup later.

This is epic. Thank you!

Offtopic: I have always wanted a tutorial for "Here is how to embed WebKit into your C++ application" (to make your own toy web browser). I realize rendering a webpage is only one very tiny component of a browser, but it's such an interesting one that I wish someone would put together a tutorial on how to do that.

For embedding a web page display, you're probably best off looking at Webkit/Gecko wrappers for whatever UI toolkit you're using. Getting an image out of the renderer itself is one thing, but tying it into the surrounding windowing environment (using the platform's native widgets, responding to input, etc.) is less trivial. Fortunately, this work has usually already been done for you, and you'll find toolkit-specific documentation on embedding.

For example, for WebKit there is Cocoa/Carbon integration[1], Cocoa Touch integration [2], KDE & Qt integration [3], GTK [4], etc. You can probably find others very easily, likewise for Gecko.

[1] http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/...

[2] http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/uikit/...

[3] http://api.kde.org/4.5-api/kdelibs-apidocs/kdewebkit/html/in...

[4] http://webkitgtk.org/

Thanks for the info. However, what I really want is a simple "here is how to render a webpage with webkit" tutorial.

(FYI I would be using .NET WinForms, so I doubt there's much open-source love.)

For reasons given above, such a tutorial would necessarily have to be specific to whatever you're trying to embed it in, or maybe at a raw framebuffer level (which isn't terribly useful unless you really are working at that level). Otherwise it'd be huge and different parts of it would not be useful to most people.

With that in mind - third Google result for 'embedding webkit in winforms':

http://aautar.digital-radiation.com/blog/?p=1327

When faced with this problem, I used the Qt port of webkit (QtWebkit) to make an ActiveX control which I can use from windows forms. It doesn't work instantly out of the box, but with a bit of massaging you can probably get what you want.

Cool bonus feature: you can mark any objects you want to expose to the browser via javascript with the COM interop attribute and send them over to your homebrewed browser control. Qt's COM interop layer turns translates the Qt flavor of dynamic dispatch calls into IDispatch calls. So it works pretty seamlessly.

I've recently ported the code to Node.js. I'll write about that whenever I have some time.

https://github.com/olalonde/node-notify

Also available through NPM:

    npm install notify

Looks nice! I recently used node to add a web interface to a C++ app myself and got annoyed with the amount of boilerplate code required for passing function arguments (type checking, unboxing, boxing return values) so I started a mechanism for automating it:

https://github.com/pmj/node-method-wrapper

It too is still work in progress, but it works pretty well so far. Note that it currently superficially relies on some node-specific extensions, though they should be pretty easy to remove, in order to use it with V8 alone.

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