WPE Android

WPE WebKit port for Android.

WPEView API

WPEView wraps the WPE WebKit browser engine in a reusable Android library. WPEView serves a similar purpose to Android's built-in WebView and tries to mimick its API aiming to be an easy to use drop-in replacement with extended functionality.

Setting up WPEView in your Android application is fairly simple.

(TODO: package, distribute and document installation)

First, add the WPEView widget to your Activity layout:

<com.wpe.wpeview.WPEView
        android:id="@+id/wpe_view"
        android:layout_width="match_parent"
        android:layout_height="match_parent"
        tools:context=".MainActivity"/>

And next, wire it in your Activity implementation to start using the API, for example, to load an URL:

override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)
    setContentView(R.layout.activity_main)

    val browser = findViewById(R.id.wpe_view)
    browser?.loadUrl(INITIAL_URL)
}

To see WPEView in action check the tools folder.

Setting up your environment

python3

The bootstrap script requires python3.

Getting the dependencies

WPE Android depends on a considerable amount of libraries, including libWPE and WPEWebKit. To ease the cross-compilation process we use Cerbero. To set all things up run:

./tools/scripts/bootstrap.py

This command will fetch the required binaries and place them in the expected location.

If you want to build (and/or modify) the dependencies you can pass the --build option:

./tools/scripts/bootstrap.py --build

This command will fetch Cerbero, the Android NDK and a bunch of dependencies required to cross-compile WPE Android dependencies. The process takes a significant amount of time.

You can optionally create a debug build of WPEWebKit passing the --debug option to the bootstrap command:

./tools/scripts/bootstrap.py --build --debug

Finally, the bootstrap option accepts the --arch option to set the target architecture. Currently supported architectures are arm64 and x86_64.

Android Studio

Android Studio is required to build and run WPE Android. Once the bootstrap process is done and all the dependencies are cross-compiled and installed, you should be able to open the launcher demo with Android Studio and run it on a real device.

WebDriver

Following demostrates how to run a simple webdriver script on emulator

1. Create python virtual environment for Selenium

Create directory for Selenium (to any location you want)

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install selenium

2. Create python Selenium script

Save following as simple_test.py

from selenium import webdriver

options = webdriver.WPEWebKitOptions()
# Custom browser
options.binary_location = "/"
# Extra browser arguments
options.add_argument("--automation")
# Remove incompatible capabilities keys
del(options._caps["platform"])
del(options._caps["version"])

driver = webdriver.Remote(command_executor="http://127.0.0.1:8888", options=options)
driver.get('http://www.wpewebkit.org')
driver.quit()

3. Run webdriver application on emulator

From android studio run webdriver application on x86-64 emulator. After emulator has started issue following on terminal

adb forward tcp:8888 tcp:8888

4. Run WebDriver Selenium tests

From Selenium directory created previously run

python3 ./simple_test.py

Known issues and limitations

• The universal wpewebkit bootstrap package is not yet supported.
• The scripts and build have only been tested in Linux.