How to go about a platform independent E-Book Reader in C/C++?

Question

Hi, I'm trying to develop an ebook reader(for mobile devices) which is platform independent. Currently my focus is epub only. As a proof of concept, we were able to make a basic epub reader for android platform, using the functionalities provided by the platform itself(using webview, Xml Parser, Unzipper etc). But now we want to make it platform independent and we want to do it in C/C++. I know we have unzippers and xml parsers in C/C++, its the rendering part I'm worried about. My questions are...

1.How can I do the rendering, without using any of the inbuilt android views, so that it will work on other platforms also? 2.Is it better to stick to webkit for epub(the platforms which we're considering all have webkit)?

As of now I'm clueless. Any pointers on where to start?

BR, Rajeev

Answer 1

The only C/C++ development environment i found was MoSync.

Answer 2

Most likely you will have to split your application into the cross-platform backend and a platform specific front-end.

If you want to implement indexing and searching of all e-pubs in your app, this could be part of the cross-platform part. If the epub reader contains a catalogue of downloaded/transferred epubs, the database including its access methods could probably be cross-platform as well (at least partially).

However, the presentation layer, i.e., the user interface, will probably have to be platform-specific. The best case scenario is that you can come up with an intermediate UI description language that can be automatically translated into Android / iPhone user interfaces. That is a daunting task however, and it's probably not even worth trying if you don't want to create many cross-platform apps.