In many distributed applications, it can be useful to run a light web browser on the server side to render some HTML content or process images, video and/or audio using JavaScript.
Some concrete use-cases can be:
- Video post-production using HTML overlays.
- Easy 3D rendering with WebGL that can be broadcasted as a video stream.
- Reusing the same JavaScript code between a frontend web application and the backend processing.
WPE WebKit is the perfect solution for all those use cases as it offers a lightweight solution which can run on low-end hardware or even within a container. It provides a lot of flexibility at the moment of choosing the backend infrastructure as WPE WebKit can, for instance, run from within a container with a very minimal Linux configuration (no need for any windowing system) and with full hardware acceleration and zero-copy of the video buffers between the GPU and the CPU.
Additionally, the fact that WPE WebKit is optimized for lower-powered devices, makes it also the perfect option for server-side rendering when scaling commercial deployments while keeping cost under control, which is yet another important factor to take into account when considering cloud rendering.