Genuitec has just released the initial bits of "WebKit for SWT." Free for download and exploration, the WebKit for SWT is the first Java implementation of the WebKit browser technology. It's developed to serve as a technology platform for Genuitec and the Eclipse Foundation’s OSS mobile Web initiative, Eclipse FireFly Mobile Web DevKit. The current release is the component that future releases will be based upon. The immediate consequence of this release is the ability to embed standards-based Web functionality into both desktop and mobile apps with ease, or create friendly hybrid applications that incorporate native and Web elements. The browser API provides all the basic browser use-cases that you would expect. Additionally, the "sexy" features of WebKit, such as HTML5, CSS3, V8 engine, Flash, etc., are now accessible from Java. The initial code is free to download and is available for Windows only, with more details available in the .zip file download. The install also requires Java6. It's licensed under the Genuitec binary license, but the goal is to open source a large portion of the codebase in future iterations in cahoots with Eclipse. For more information, please follow this link: http://www.genuitec.com/about/labs.html

I remember was working on a swing webkit component called JWebPane that was scheduled to be included in javafx Does anyone know what happened to it ?

Sun talked about providing a Swing version of the JavaFX JWebPane about a year ago. There have been some follow up blog ANNs since but nothing concrete. A WebKit for Swing version of this project is under development now.

Sounds like JWebPane is being held up by the amazing Sun marketing machine. See http://weblogs.java.net/blog/alex2d/archive/2008/12/jwebpane_projec_1.html#comments. It looks like the differences between this and JWebPane are the following: 1) This is available now, and JWebPane isn't. 2) JWebpane is connected to webkit via JNI, but rendering, network IO, ultimately happen in Java, whereas Genuitic just uses JNI to fire off an instance of Chromium which does everything.

It looks like the differences between this and JWebPane are the following:
1) This is available now, and JWebPane isn't.
2) JWebpane is connected to webkit via JNI, but rendering, network IO, ultimately happen in Java, whereas Genuitic just uses JNI to fire off an instance of Chromium which does everything.

Yep, Chromium is amazingly quick and is improving at pretty quick clip. So rather than reinvent its features in Java we took the pragmatic approach and let Chromium and Java respectively do what they do best. If needed APIs are available that enable manually control of rendering, page and resource loading, and javascript execution. We are expanding the API now.

So apart from it being webkit. How is this better / different than swt's standard browser component ? http://help.eclipse.org/help32/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv/reference/api/org/eclipse/swt/browser/Browser.html

Some comments: * It works fine, cannot be different because the core is Chrome. * There is no way to differentiate this browser from Safari desktop in Windows. There is no specific header and user agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/530.0 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.1 Safari/530.0 I recommend replacing "Version" by "SWTWebKitBrowser" or including inside "(Windows ... en-US)" * Cannot drop down a select control (single selection, no "size" attribute). Select multiple works fine (this is curious because select multiple is usually a nightmare in WebKit browsers). * doesn't work. In spite of these minor problems, is a very nice piece of software and is already supported by ItsNat because is seen as a Safari desktop browser. By the way ItsNat 0.6 is going to be released this week.

There is no way to differentiate this browser from Safari desktop in Windows. There is no specific header and user agent is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/530.0 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.1 Safari/530.0

I recommend replacing "Version" by "SWTWebKitBrowser" or including inside "(Windows ... en-US)"

The next release will allow include an API for programmatically setting the user-agent string from each browser component.

* Cannot drop down a select control (single selection, no "size" attribute).

This issue was listed in the developer doc. It was fixed just after the 0.5 release and will be included in the next release (0.6).

In spite of these minor problems, is a very nice piece of software ...

Thanks and good luck with your release.

The next release will allow include an API for programmatically setting the user-agent string from each browser component.

Fine. Anyway an custom header is desirable, this way, we, framework developers, can identify the target browser with no doubt. For instance, the user agent of SkyFire is the same as FireFox 2, however a specific header is sent to the client and can be used to identify SkyFire.