The Racket GUI system is nice, but as with almost any GUI system, sometimes I
yearn for the simplicity of HTML rendering. CSS and JavaScript let
properly-styled HTML be easily inserted into almost any application without
anyone realizing it isn’t native, so long as it’s fast and seamless.
Basically, I want to try and create a wrapper for a Chromium web view
<https://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/> to be able to add to a Racket GUI
in the same way that I can add, say, a horizontal-panel%. However, even putting
the logistics of the complications that would involve aside, the question
becomes… is it even possible to implement a new native UI component without
sticking it into the internals of MrEd?
Currently, all of the plumbing that handles the linkage of the GUI classes with
their underlying native counterparts is tightly woven into the gui library
itself. There’s no way for an external package to hook into that system and add
something new, as far as I can tell. Ideally, I’d like to be able to write a
native library for each platform to define a GTK widget, a Cocoa view, and a
Windows… whatever they’re called in Windows. (I don’t do Windows development.)
Then I’d be able to write my own plumbing to connect those native components
with a Racket class that would provide the adequate abstractions.
I’m willing to work out those problems, but in order to do that, I do need to
figure out a suitable method for actually adding a GUI component. I’d love for
adding a web view to be as easy as typing (new web-view% [parent frame] [url
"http://google.com";]) and have it just work.
Is this possible? Is it foreseeably possible? If not, what would be the best
way to integrate such functionality so that it’s at least semi-composable with
the existing libraries?
(As a note, rendering to a canvas% or something like that is most certainly out
of the question. Chromium needs access to the window itself to get the
hardware-accelerated performance necessary to actually make it feasible.)
Alexis
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