Development News

After a quite intensive and challenging review and selection process, we are pleased to announce that Haiku has been assigned five (5) student slots for the Google Summer of Code 2008. This year, Google accepted many more mentor organizations than ever before, which made the allotment of students slots a lot more competitive. We also received applications of very high quality, which is definitely a blessing, but also made the Haiku mentor's task of narrowing down to a final selection much tougher. After thorough review of all the applications, and carefully taking into consideration factors such as immediate benefits for our project, the likelihood of getting long-term contributors, and the availability of an appropriate mentor for any given project, we have come up with the final list of students that will be coding for Haiku during the GSoC 2008 program. Here it is:

David McPaul, on behalf of 3ivx Technologies Pty. Ltd, has just announced on the Haiku mailing list the release of the latest version (5.02) of the 3ivx MPEG-4 ASP video decoder and encoder for the BeOS R5 platform, including an experimental 3ivx decoder for Haiku. Available on the 3ivx website, this release includes many bug fixes, frame accurate seeking, experimental support for mp4 files and aac audio, and a Haiku version of the 3ivx decoder. Haiku versions of the 3ivx decoder and aac decoder are expected to be supported in the future, and a Haiku-specific 3ivx encoder will be released once encoding support is added to the Haiku Media Kit. This is an exciting development, and hopefully just the beginning of a bright future for Haiku in the area of media format support.

It's been almost one year since we announced our conversations with ACCESS Co. Ltd. targeted at releasing legacy BeOS related documents, and today we are happy to inform the community that this project has finally arrived to a happy conclusion: the BeBook and all the Be Newsletters are now available online. As an emerging open source project, documentation for Haiku is still hard to come by; and while our Documentation Team works on creating Haiku-specific material, the BeBook and the Be Newsletters will provide valuable reference material for all developers, new and experienced alike. We want to express our gratitude to ACCESS Co., Ltd. for supporting our project, particularly to Director of Open Source Technologies David "Lefty" Schlesinger, for personally following up on our request. Special thanks also go to community member Simon Kennedy, for nicely formatting the documents for us.

We are very pleased to announce that, for the second straight year, Haiku has been accepted as a mentor organization for the Google Summer of Code. The student application period will start soon, so if you are a student who would like to work on a Haiku project for the GSoC 2008, please check out our List of GSoC Ideas and Students: How to Apply pages for detailed information on how to apply. If you still have any questions specific to GSoC after reading these pages, please contact the Haiku GSoC administrator (Bruno Albuquerque). If you have any general questions about Haiku and want to start familiarizing yourself with our community, which we encourage you to, please join the Haiku development mailing list and also feel free to stop by the #haiku IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. Our friendly community members will be glad to help you out in pursuing a Haiku project for the GSoC 2008 and beyond.

We are very excited to announce the creation of a new project team that will bring Java technologies to the Haiku Operating System. This team was established under the initiative of Haiku developer and team lead Bryan Varner, and is officially endorsed by the Haiku development team. In fact, discussions have taken place between Bryan and the rest of the core Haiku developers to start building synergy to ensure the viability of the Java Team's goals within the Haiku project.

The team's initial goal will be to port OpenJDK to Haiku. We want to have the Haiku port included within the structure of Sun's OpenJDK project, and discussions have been taking place with members of the OpenJDK Porters Group to pursue this objective. After a meeting between Bryan, the Haiku core developers and Dalibor Topic, member and moderator of the Porters Group discussion list, we submitted a proposal in order to find a sponsor member within the Porters Group to make the official proposal to the OpenJDK project as a whole. OpenJDK Groups have two weeks to vote on sponsorship of this proposal. A majority vote is required from one group for approval.

Until very recently, the community of Haiku testers and developers, as well as those curious geeks who wanted to give Haiku a spin, relied on the services of HaikuHost.com to download nightly builds of hard disk raw and VMware images. This site, which was operated by Jonathan Freeman, has recently closed its doors, so we felt we needed a replacement. Let me introduce you to Haiku Files.

For a Haikuware Bounty, Ryan Leavengood set out to port WebKit, a framework to render modern web contents. Actually, from the start it was supposed to be a first shot to get the basics to compile for Haiku, as a complete port is a huge endeavour that keeps a skilled team busy for many months.

The deadline for the bounty has recently been reached and the set goal has been achieved more or less. Read Ryan's summary at Haikuware for the details.

Now that the first step is taken, everyone's invited to help further develop and later on optimize and streamline the code. Marcus Jacob and Andrea Anzani have already stepped up to give Ryan a hand.

The plan is to have the port hosted directly in the official WebKit repository. Before that can happen a few more basics need to be implemented, which should happen within the next few weeks.

Ryan has provided a developer's document with detailed build instructions for those who wish to work on the port. Check it out.