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Building WPE WebKit for Raspberry Pi 3
I’ve been a fan of the Raspberry Pi since it first came out in 2012. It’s very handy to run little applications that interact with GPIO ports. Controlling our garage doors or using one as media player are good examples
I’ve always disliked that the Pi’s browsers don’t support any hardware acceleration. This means you cannot render any fancy HTML5, CSS3 or WEBGL animations like these:
So I was thrilled to see that the Spanish software company named Igalia released a WebKit port for Embedded systems including the Raspberry Pi: https://www.igalia.com/wpe/
This may come in handy for several projects I have been working on, including my team trivia system that I’m building using Node.js, HTML5 and websockets.
Building WPE WebKit
As there is no binary available out of the box for the Pi, you have to build WPE WebKit yourself. I first thought of building it on the Pi, but according to the creators, that would take “an insane amount of time”.
They propose using a build system like Buildroot or Yocto. At first, I wasn’t a big fan of that, but I had no other options. These build systems are used to cross compile a complete Linux operation system filled with the applications and tools of your choosing. So instead of downloading the Raspbian image…
