webpositive | Haiku Project

Unexpected

Blog post by aldeck on Wed, 2012-06-13 01:32

After a week of struggling with my friend the compiler, I finally managed to bring the port into a buildable state again. Porting the latest changes to libwebkit, the last of the four WebKit subcomponents (libwtf, libjavascriptcore, libwebcore, libwebkit), took me more time than I anticipated but to my great surprise, after I fixed the first runtime crash, HaikuLauncher and WebPositive would run and be almost usable. Yes, there are visual glitches, and it is quite easy to crash, but you can search google, use maps, facebook, haiku-os.org and post this blog post.

This was totally unexpected, I would have considered it normal to struggle with numerous crashes on startup, but it seems that I didn't broke that many things in the upgrade. The first thing that I noticed was the overall snappiness even in debug mode and, after looking for a simple load time benchmark, I confirmed that first impression. This benchmark shows a ~3x improvement in load time. Javascript is substantially faster too, but you know that already if you read my last post.

This is really encouraging, especially for me, as I've now got something to click and play with... after discussing with a compiler for almost a month :-)

Now the real work begins, fix all regressions and provide a solid release, one that can run the most important sites correctly. And if I've got some time left, I'll look into bringing new features and enhancements. But don't count too much on that, if prefer concentrating on a solid base for now.

Screenshot (sorry I couldn't manage to embed the image)

Making it Build

Blog post by aldeck on Wed, 2012-06-06 00:29

webpositive, WebKit, contract

Hello fellow Haiku'ers, as promised I'm posting a quick update on my WebKit / WebPositive contract work. It's been a little more than a week already, and a small report is due!

Welcome WebKit r115944 ! As you may know, WebKit is a really big project, in the last two years, 70000 revisions have passed and the file count has almost doubled. The approach I took was to start by checking out a recent WebKit revision and try building the components one by one, re-applying our changes. The idea was to add only the strict necessary for Haiku and at the same time try to include as many features as possible, ignoring assumptions and workarounds that aren't needed anymore. As many things have changed in WebKit and as I needed to get familiar with this huge codebase anyway, I decided to dismantle our port and put it back together again, like one would have done with a complex piece of mechanics. Thus I did a Jamfile from scratch, based on other platforms buildsystems, and replayed our changes one by one, as the compiler asked. Each time trying to document my changes and research the reasons and implications of the changes.

Services Kit features overview

Blog post by Shisui on Thu, 2010-08-19 09:45

gsoc, gsoc2010, HTTP, services, Services Kit, WebKit, webpositive

The coding period of the Google Summer of Code is now over since this Monday, and it's time to give to the Haiku Community a debrief of what has been done on my initial project, what has been modified, and what remains to do.

WebPositive gets polishing

Blog post by stippi on Sat, 2010-04-03 19:55

native browser, WebKit, webpositive

Hah, you wish! These blog titles are getting way ahead of the progress I make with WebPositive. Or let's say the title is truthful in some ways, but on the other hand perhaps suggesting more substantial progress than what was made. I did turn my attention to fixing a lot of little annoyances and bugs that were reported via various channels, the comments section of this series of blog entries being among the important sources of feedback. So keep the good feedback comming, it's very useful for me!

WebPositive matures

Blog post by stippi on Fri, 2010-03-19 12:31

browser, native, webcore, WebKit, webpositive

Well... that might be a bit bold for me to say. Obviously WebPositive still has a lot of things missing. On the other hand, this version adds some of the most crucial things, like persistent cookie support, bookmarks and a much improved browsing history implementation.

WebPositive emerges

Blog post by stippi on Tue, 2010-03-02 21:18

native browser, WebKit, webpositive

Wow, it's been 10 days already since I posted my first blog entry on my work on WebKit and the native web browser. Of course my continous updates to the package I posted in my first article will probably have spoiled most of the surprise, but HaikuLauncher has been reduced again into just a bare browser shell, while a new codebase, WebPositive, has been split off from it. Using WebPositive has become a whole lot more pleasing in the meantime. For those of you who have not followed the comments to the original blog, these are the things implemented since my first post on the project:

Diving into WebKit

Blog post by stippi on Tue, 2010-02-23 19:11

WebKit, webpositive

First of all, I want to thank Haiku, Inc. for giving me the opportunity to concentrate fully for a while on the WebKit port and browser! This is an awesome chance that I intend to make full use of.

At the moment, I have mixed feelings. Not about writing blogs. Not about working on WebKit. But about using the new WebKit browser to write the blog entry, haha! I've seen it crash, although in the last days, it has become pretty stable. After we upgraded to a newer WebKit version as the basis for the port, the frequent random crashes have almost disappeared and I saw only one crash in three days. Compared to one every few minutes before.