WebKit Apocrypha

For some time it has been possible to build and run QtWebKit on Linux using Google's V8 JavaScript engine instead of the default JavaScriptCore. I thought it would be good to see some numbers comparing the runtime performance of the two engines in the same environment and also measuring the performance of the browser bindings.

In this post I'll show you how to configure and compile a MinGW toolchain for cross-compilation on Linux, then how to build Qt using this toolchain and finally compile the Qt port of WebKit from trunk.

When I tried to cross compile QtWebKit for ARM-Linux, I didn't find any clear description, so I have decided to write a blogpost about it. It's not too hard, but if you have never done something like this, it can be a little bit confusing. In this post, I will describe this method in some simple steps.

There are a lot of make specifications in Qt, but none of them is suitable for RVCT compilation. So, if you want to compile QtWebKit with RVCT, you have two options: either you create a new specification or you can use an existing one with wrapper scripts. In this post I'll describe the second option.

WebKitGtk+ cross compilation consists of two parts. First, you need a cross compiler and the library dependencies of WebKitGtk+. Next, you have to setup the build system properly. You can reach this with some wrapper scripts.

If we would like to build WebKitGTK+ for ARM platform, Scratchbox could be a good choice. In this post I will show, how we can install and setup Scratchbox to build WebKitGTK+. First, we have to install the Scratchbox and its ARM target. Next, we install some libraries to WebKitGTK+.
Let's see how we can do that.