I am trying to configure the back-end engine of Bon Echo browser on QNX6.4.
I understood after an initial research that to configure engine, we need to edit /etc/photon/webservers file.
Here was the content of my webservers file
default server for “online” browsing (Voyager client by default uses this)
From this file, I assume that vserver is the current engine used by Bon Echo.
To confirm the point, I run pidin command to find if vserver is running. I found it was running.
For test purpose, I killed the vserver process and confirmed it again with pidin command.
Then I tried to open Bon Echo browser and tried to open a html file. It successfully opened the html file.
I even commented out all the “online =” entries in webservers file and reopened the Bon Echo browser. There was no problem in opening html files.
From wiki, i understood Mozilla uses Gecko rendering engine. But I failed to find out such a process using pidin command.
Now these are my concerns.
Which is the rendering engine of Bon Echo in QNX?
How can I configure Bon Echo to work with any other rendering engine?
Why did the changes in /etc/photon/webservers file not affect the Bon Echo browser working?
I even tried to change the online entry in webservers file to:
online = /opt/Mozilla/mozilla/run-mozilla.sh /opt/Mozilla/mozilla/mozserver,MozillaServer
Also commented out this entry. I felt there was no effect in editing webservers file to Bon Echo browser working.
It’s been a while since I looked at these features. I don’t recall the name “Bon Echo” from QNX at all. Here’s what I do recall. The QNX PtWebClient widget relies on a back-end rendering engine. The widget picked which engine, but this choice depended on the config file you mention. So changing the config file might not change anything if the widget was making another choice. Of of the back end engines mentioned in the documentIon was available only from QNX by request, and possibly some payment. Of the two remaining engines, the older one supported all the resources of the PtWebClient widget but was older technology, supporting an older HTML standard. I recall one deficit was lack of PNG support. The other newer engine used a module with the word Mozilla in the name. It did not support all the resources in PtWebClient as described in the QNX Photon documentation, but it did support a newer HTML standard, and did support PNG images.
The function of the backend rendering engine was limited. It turned an HTML document into a graphic image. The purpose of the PtWebClient widget was to interact with the functioning of the rendering engine, indicating where to get the HTML document, web or local file for example. Use of the widget allowed one to create a limited or full functioning browser. As an example, I believe that the Photon help viewer used PtWebClient, thereby allowing HTML documentation to be displayed. It was limited in that it did allow URL displays. It also added the function of providing searches in the local documentation files. The port of Firefox presumable also uses this widget but to provide a more general purpose web browser.
Unfortunately, all of this technology is fairly old at this point, and not up today with modern standards. It still can be useful. On a daily basis I will upload and download files to my QNX 6.5 system using Firefox and my gmail account. Gmail works in an older less dynamic mode, but it does work. This provides me a one step process instead of copying a file to another OS, eg. OS X or Windows 7 and then using Gmail, which would be a two step process.
I’m aware of Qt’s support of WebKit, but I don’t know much about it. If you want to create a browser or display program for QNX 6 with more modern HTML support and can use Qt, that’s probably the direction to look in. It is conceivable that WebKit could be adapted to work with Photon, but you will not get any help from QNX.