Haiku is currently missing a subsystem allowing application to be connected to Web 2.0, although this is becoming important relatively to the interaction between users and "the world" through the Internet. The development of the Services Kit would permits to Haiku applications to access various web services, such as micro-blogging (twitter, ...), pasting services (pastebin, pastie, ...), social networks (last.fm, ...).
With the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses that is expected to happen soon, the next Internet protocol version IPv6 has become more important than ever. All major desktop operating systems (Windows, Mac OS, Linux) already have IPv6 support. The main objective of this Summer of Code project is to create an IPv6 implementation in Haiku kernel. This work will allow user-space application developers to add IPv6 support to their programs, and Haiku users to have IPv6 connectivity to the Internet or other networks.
The full proposal follows.
Currently Haiku is stuck in the 32bit world. This is fine for the initial BeOS R5 compatible release, but this is extremely limiting for future releases. It's a reasonable goal for Haiku to have a mature 64bit x86 port by the time the R2 release comes out. However ports don't become mature overnight. If full time work is put into porting haiku to the x86_64 platform this summer it'll be feasible to finish the port in a reasonable time to have it throughly tested and ready for the R2 release.
My project for the GSoC is to start the Haiku x86_64 port by completely porting the kernel and modifying the bootloader to load a x86_64 haiku kernel.
Project Outline
My GSoC project revolves around polishing and preparing Haiku's Layout API for public consumption. Currently, this is only supposed to be used in Haiku's included applications, so third party applications must manually position and resize all their GUI elements, which can be really tedious and inflexible. I will also be modifying some Haiku-provided applications to use the Layout API, which will help me find bugs and help with Haiku's ongoing localization.
Haiku currently has ext2 read-only support. My project is to extend the code to allow for full ext3 support. The code will be MIT licensed and will be object-oriented (inspired by Haiku’s BFS implementation), allowing for easy understanding, learning and maintainability.
The full Google Summer of Code application follows:
Haiku has great support for its own file system, but most others are only available read-only or not accessible. Providing reliable read-write support to one such file system is a complex task, and needs to be repeated for each type of file system.
Linux contains state of the art, full featured implementations for a large number of file systems.
lkl-haiku-fsd is a generic driver based on the Linux kernel library (LKL), reusing Linux' optimized and debugged file system implementations.
It’s strange how a week goes by so quickly now, but it’s good motivation to keep writing! This lesson takes a break from hacking the Haiku API to learn a few C++ language concepts needed to continue progress as an aspiring developer. Function overloading and operator overloading are examined in detail. Enjoy! Learning to Program With Haiku, Lesson 16.
Having written our first program, Lesson 15 delves further into what writing basic applications are all about, looking at the API and its organization and focusing on an essential: messaging. Also included in this lesson are the finished sources for those who don’t want to mess around with typing the project out.
Learning to Program With Haiku, Lesson 15
Lesson 15 Project Sources: ClickMe.zip
At least it can finally log into Facebook. Not that I am a fan of Facebook, but I realize how important it is for WebPositive to be able to log into that site. Some other seemingly random crashes have a good chance of being fixed, too, since I was able to track down a memory corruption bug that was caused by different parts of the code being compiled with incompatible defines. Unfortunately this took a bit of experiementing until I was finally on the right track. Today I hooked up my quad core machine to temporarily replace my regular Haiku work machine, which is CPU wise a bit underpowered. The insane rebuild times were really getting on my nerves. Even with the quad core it took quite a bit of patience, but to be absolutely sure to compile everything with the right defines, I had to compile… well… everything. Many times.
