The GNOME Developers Put Out The First SeedKit Release

The GNOME developers have announced their first public release (v0.1) of SeedKit, consisting of both the GNOME SeedKit Viewer and the SeedKit library. GNOME's SeedKit is designed to blend web technologies (namely HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript) into the GNOME desktop by allowing native user-interfaces to be written in these web technologies. SeedKit leverages GTK+, WebKit, and Seed to lower the barrier to creating new user-interfaces for the GNOME desktop. SeedKit was inspired by Palm's WebOS SDK and Mozilla's JetPack.

The library to SeedKit provides a HTML view Gtk+ widget with access to lower-level libraries and systems through JavaScript and is built around the Gtk+ port of the WebKit rendering engine combined with Seed, which enables standalone applications to be written or extended by JavaScript. The GNOME Seed project has been around since late 2008. The viewer portion of SeedKit is a command-line way to launch these applications that are written in "pure web standard technologies" while opening the path for these programs to tap into the lower-level libraries/systems. There's also a few examples of such hybrid web-desktop applications offered within SeedKit Viewer 0.1. Using GNOME's SeedKit depends upon GTK+ 3.0.

More information detailing GNOME SeedKit can be found on the GNOME Live Wiki or in today's inaugural release announcement.