Blogs

BeGeistert 018 - A Personal Report

Blog post by stippi on Mon, 2008-01-14 16:28
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To be honest, I was a bit desperate in the run up to BeGeistert 018. The fact that most of our core contributors were present gave me high hopes for a good push of Haiku development. Since my laptop was stolen, which was a really solid Haiku machine, I could not run Haiku natively on my main development computer. Even on some older computers I had, I could not run it anymore since the initial changes to the IDE stack. Next was the fact that I bought a new USB based KVM switch. The only USB stack with which I had a working keyboard and mouse was the original Dano stack. And even then I sometimes lost input when switching back to BeOS from another computer. With Haiku, the input devices were not working at all. So I was packing both my computer, monitor and the KVM switch for BeGeistert, all in all, it was quite a load. I was heading towards BeGeistert with a bit of mixed feelings, because Haiku wasn't working so well for me anymore and I didn't know if it was going to be fun only or with some disappointments mixed in.

still breathin'

Blog post by Jace on Fri, 2008-01-04 02:29

i'm going to miss those of you at Haiku who are moving on. i'm in a dark time of my life, maybe the end, and i revisit the old good times now and then and BeOS is one of the bright, shining gems, despite the bittersweet facts of how it all went down.

i'm still breathing at the moment. i still run BeOS (GoBe Productive owns all my writing ;-) and i could use tips on getting out of the DNS nightmare i am having with Verizon and BeOS Pro R5.0.3 ... :-(

i've not had any contact with anyone from beunited.org despite attempts over the last two years (not great attempts, but some). If anyone from beunited.org wants to regroup, let me know.

BeWine is still a nowhere project for the same reasons as before, sorry.

Webkit port: talking to Andrea "xeD" Anzani

Blog post by koki on Sat, 2007-12-22 01:19
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Webkit rendering bebits.comWebkit 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.

Our first decent WebKit rendering!

Blog post by leavengood on Wed, 2007-12-19 00:04
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The WebKit Haiku port team has seen some nice progress lately in the form of our first decent rendering. Read more to see it...

Kansai Open Source Forum: Day 2 Report

Blog post by koki on Tue, 2007-11-20 07:13
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Demo machine at KOF Haiku boothDemo machine at KOF Haiku boothNot surprisingly, it took me much longer than originally planned to find the time to write about the second day at the Kansai Open Source Forum conference (KOF). But no worries: memories are still quite fresh, as it's usually the case when things go well and you have fun. The second KOF day started earlier, especially for me. The exhibits were scheduled to open at 10:00AM, so with Momoziro we decided to meet at the hotel lobby at around 9:00AM. But I was up way before that, at around 5:30AM (compliments of my very jet-lagged old body). So I sat in front of my laptop to write some emails and then went through my Haiku presentation slides again, making little changes here and there, changing the order of a few slides and even adding a couple of slides based on some of the questions that I had received during the first day at KOF.

WebCore Now Compiles for Haiku

Blog post by leavengood on Mon, 2007-11-12 05:40
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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.

There are still some "stubbed out" classes in the Haiku platform code in WebCore, which means they don't do anything and just exist to make the code compile. Fortunately I have coded a lot of the needed platform files, but the ones which are stubbed out are some of the more complicated ones.

But I am very eager to finally get a simple web launcher running on Haiku to test the port, so I plan to work on this project after work this next week. For those not aware my (self-assigned) deadline for the WebKit Port Bounty on Haikuware is November 15th, which is this next Thursday. I think this deadline was a good motivator so I am glad I have it, but I don't think the port will be rock solid and "complete" by then. Keep in mind that the Qt port of WebKit is also missing a lot and has been worked on by many developers for more than a year. In addition WebKit originally came from KHTML which was a Qt-based HTML engine, so they have another advantage in that the design is Qt-friendly. Even the Windows port which is done by Apple employees who are experts on WebKit is still missing things that the main Mac OS X port has.

I don't say all this as some big excuse. I just want people to realize this is quite a big project and involves my learning the design of WebKit as well as aspects of the Haiku API I am not aware of. Plus as I have discussed before I have had to set up a new cross-compiler environment, port and then build four external libraries WebKit needs (CURL, ICU, SQLite, and libxml2), and write new Jamfiles for JavaScriptCore and WebCore so they can be built with the Haiku build system. I have also added missing features to Haiku that WebKit needed. In the end I think I will be a much better developer after doing all this, but it does involve a lot of work. I expect that once I get over this first hump of the main work for the port, other people will be able (and hopefully willing) to help. I do know at least one Haiku developer who has interest in helping a bit.

So what do I plan to deliver to satisfy the bounty? Well I have started working on "HaikuLauncher", inspired by the QtLauncher, which will be a very basic browser shell to drive the WebKit engine. I would like this to be able to load a web page and render it properly. Beyond that I'm not guaranteeing anything, at least for another few months until I can write a full browser (which is outside the scope of the bounty.)

Given this I hope the folks who contributed to the bounty can feel satisfied that their money was well spent.

Impressions of the Kansai Open Source Forum Conference: Day 1

Blog post by koki on Sun, 2007-11-11 01:29
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This past Friday and Saturday I attended the Kansai Open Source Forum (KOF) conference in Osaka, Japan, to represent the Haiku project together with my Japanese friend and BeOS/Haiku developers Momoziro-san. Here are my impressions from the first day at KOF.

ATC complex in Osaka, where the KOF conference was held.ATC complex in Osaka, where the KOF conference was held.

KOF was held at the Asian Trade Center (ATC), located in the waterfront area known as the Osaka Bay Area. ATC is a huge complex of which the KOF exhibit area was only a very small part; the complex has a lot of stores and space for various types of events that are held on a regular basis. Ironically, the KOF exhibit floor was on an area of ATC called the MARE Gallery; I say ironically, because as some may know, Mare is my last name. That and the fact that Japan is like my second home (I lived there for about 23 years) kind of made me feel welcome. ;)

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