full featured HTML rendering engine like WebKit/Gecko for embedded Linux?

Question

I want to use HTML+CSS+JavaScript to develop a user interface for a touchscreen device in a Linux environment and need a suitable rendering engine.

The device in question will have a ARM CPU with 400 to 900 MHz clock, a VGA or WVGA display and about 256 MB RAM or more with standard Debian Linux (minimalistic install).

Ideally the rendering engine would directly access /dev/fb0 and mouse events. Since the browser is just used as a rendering engine I do not need/want any GUI - no windows, no tabs, no dialog boxes, just a single full-screen HTML page that heavily uses JavaScript to interact with the user (like a dynamic web page).

It would be great if Qt / GTK / DirectFB and such could be avoided (to reduce memory overhead and startup time) but of course this is not absolutely necessary.

Of course WebKit and Gecko come to my mind but they are both hard to understand and hard to compile. Perhaps one of the numerous forks comes close to what I need (I searched but had no luck so far)?

Answer 1

Ok, I think I found a valid solution myself. The standard Qt (embedded) distribution already includes the WebKit engine and writing a full-screen browser that directly draws to /dev/fb0 (no X11) is rather easy.

I will write such a (open source) browser for touchscreen devices (no mouse pointer, no borders, just the plain web page) with some JavaScript extensions for file system access, Syslog and console.log support and probably SQLite access.