Slightly ahead of the keynote later today, Apple has pushed some of its new APIs for developers into the open-source channels. The class in question is a new view that appears to replace the current iOS and OS X WebKit implementations, which enables apps to show webpages and other content inline.
The new framework seems to indicate a focus on cross-platform API compatibility, between iOS and OS X. The leaked framework seems to be fully feature-compatible across platforms. This differs to the situation today, where developers must use the ‘WebView’ class for OS X and ‘UIWebView’ for iOS. This should help developers write more reusable code.
The new class still uses different view classes between the two platforms, which indicates that Apple has not ported UIKit over to the Mac, as some developers hoped for.
WebKit uses an open-source license that means Apple must contribute its additions to the framework back into the community. Usually, Apple holds back on releasing the commits until it announces the new tools and frameworks.
In this case, however, Apple engineers seems to have jumped the gun a little early, with the timestamp for the commit saying the code was pushed a few hours ago. No doubt Apple will talk about changes to WebKit and other frameworks in the sessions this week at the conference.
