development

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.

Some will argue that these were just meaningless numbers, nevertheless we have reached significant milestones today: 1000th bug entry, and even better, 20000th subversion change. Recent subversion changes include many bug fixes and several additions in the file system area.

Several file system add-ons were ported from BeOS (Haiku has a different VFS interface):

• NTFS, using a GPLed libntfs, should even handle writing if you don't mind some risk of losing data.
• NFSv2, from an add-on once published on BeBits, should allow using files from Unix servers and maybe someday be used for network booting along with PXE.
• GoogleFS, a tech demo showing how queries can be handed over to Google.

In other additions, Marcus Overhagen finished implementing PXE support. PXE is the first step to providing network boot support. The kernel still needs to be programmed to mount the boot volume from the network.