VA Smalltalk binding for Chromium embedded. Is this doable?

Jan,

I created a commercial product targeted directly at embedding modern HTML5 platform capable webkit-based browsers in desktop applications.  The majority of my career has been focused on creating desktop applications, and I've found that HTML5-based UIs are less expensive to create and more powerful than ones created using the traditional desktop toolkits.

We did in fact wrap Google Chrome Frame as an Active-X control on Windows, and the WebKit framework on Mac OSX.  Linux is not addressed yet, as we've seen little customer demand so far.  Because we re-use other libraries, the download size is much smaller than Chromium Embedded — less than 1MB versus 50MB for CEF.

We are still creating language bindings for popular web languages like Node, Ruby, and Python, but the C bindings are available, stable, tested, and deployed for my closed beta customers.

If you are interested, you can find it at <a href="http://bellite.io" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" onmousedown="this.href=&#39;http://www.google.com/url?q\x3dhttp%3A%2F%2Fbellite.io\x26sa\x3dD\x26sntz\x3d1\x26usg\x3dAFQjCNGdLI9sU56R7mYdMothDkHSmQPLYA&#39;;return true;" onclick="this.href=&#39;http://www.google.com/url?q\x3dhttp%3A%2F%2Fbellite.io\x26sa\x3dD\x26sntz\x3d1\x26usg\x3dAFQjCNGdLI9sU56R7mYdMothDkHSmQPLYA&#39;;return true;">http://bellite.io — it is in open beta while we are finishing language bindings and broadening our customer base to flush out more aspects of the library.  I welcome feedback on the C api and any ways we can make integration easier.

Thanks!

-Shane

Hello list,

Chromium enbedded [1] is an open source library/framework for embedding the Chromium browser inside a windows application. I think functionality like this is very interesting for existing VA Smalltalk client applications. With the embedded browser you can easely display HTML content. You could use the new HTML5 functionality to show fancy graphics and animations. And you could even show Flash movies inside your Smalltalk app.

I have some experience with PlatformFunctions in VA. But the Chromium-embedded API looks quite complex and I am not sure if it's doable from VA Smalltalk. The "default" API uses C++. There is a C-API that is derived from the C++ API but the C-API is poorly documented. The C-API also uses a lot of callbacks.

Does anyone have experience interfacing with a C++ library? Is this possible from VA Smalltalk?

Regards,
Jan van de Sandt.

[1] <a href="http://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" onmousedown="this.href=&#39;http://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/&#39;;return true;" onclick="this.href=&#39;http://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/&#39;;return true;">http://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/