WebKit

Webkit rendering bebits.comIt looks like the Haiku Webkit port initiated by Ryan Leavengood has entered a productive second stage of development, and thanks to the recent work by one of the new project team members, Andrea "xeD" Anzani, tangible progress has been made as shown by the recent screenshot showing the HaikuLauncher application rendering bebits.com (shown to the right). I was curious about his work, so I went directly to the source and asked a few questions to Andrea; here are his answers.

Andrea: From the questions you wrote, it looks like you think we have a working browser here. Well, we don't. I'm sorry to tell you but what you see it's just a proof that the webkit is working. Still incomplete and with a lot of bugs. The webkit is, in short words, a framework for loading, parsing and drawing an html page (including net connections and javascript interpreter). We are working on fixing and finishing it. When we are done with porting the webkit, then we can speak about the development of a web browser.

The WebKit Haiku port team has seen some nice progress lately in the form of our first decent rendering. Read more to see it...

I know I have been very quiet for a while in regards to my Haiku WebKit port, but that is because I've been in a long session of coding. I am happy to report that this weekend I finally got WebCore compiling for Haiku:

Link ../../../generated/objects/haiku/x86/release/WebKit/WebCore/libwebcore.so 
Chmod1 ../../../generated/objects/haiku/x86/release/WebKit/WebCore/libwebcore.so 
SetType1 ../../../generated/objects/haiku/x86/release/WebKit/WebCore/libwebcore.so 
MimeSet1 ../../../generated/objects/haiku/x86/release/WebKit/WebCore/libwebcore.so 
SetVersion1 ../../../generated/objects/haiku/x86/release/WebKit/WebCore/libwebcore.so 

So what does this mean? Does it mean the port is now complete? Unfortunately, no it doesn't.

So after a few frustrating weeks of very little progress on my WebKit port, I have finally gotten JavaScriptCore running on Haiku!

I have been documenting my progress on porting the WebKit project to Haiku on the Haikuware site, but decided to also post information here. You may want to read my previous blog article about this port and also the information at the WebKit bounty on Haikuware. Please consider donating to a bounty.

Before I started work on this port I asked in the #webkit IRC channel what the mimimum version of GCC that was required to compile WebKit. The general consensus was 4.0. So what does that mean?