gsoc 2009

Google held the 2009 Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit meeting Oct 24-25, 2009. Since many of the Haiku mentors were busy attending BeGeistert and others were tied up with other events like the Florida Linux Show, I ended up being the only Haiku mentor to attend this year.
The weekend was filled with many sessions and lots of hallway time. I managed to meet many mentors from the other projects and many had heard of Haiku and many had even tried out the Alpha. I got a chance to meet with Sam Lantinga from SDL, who I had just sent patches for SDL and a few of the SDL libs in time for their recent SDL-1.2.14 release. I also talked with the guys from BRL-CAD and BZFlag who had already installed Haiku and were working on porting their stuff. I also talked with Bill Kendrick (TuxPaint) and David Bruce (Tux4Kids) and showed them TuxPaint running on Haiku. I talked with Joel Sherrill and Chris Johns from RTEMS and Matthew Dillion from DragonFlyBSD and they told me about a session they were putting together for Sunday. This session was held at the same time as a Distro session was going on, our session was a !Linux Meetup (http://gsoc-wiki.osuosl.org/index.php/Non-Linux_OS_Meetup). Mentors from 7 or 8 alternative Operating Systems and a couple from gcc, met for an hour and talked about ways that we could work together, we talked about drivers for most of that meeting. Out of that session was born the Rosetta-OS google group where we can continue talking (http://code.google.com/p/rosetta-os/).

I also got a chance to meet and talk with Alex Botero-Lowry, he's working on porting emacs to Haiku, he was there with XMMS. Saw a few familiar faces of people we've met at shows, including David Maxwell with NetBSD (Coverity) and John Hawley from Etherboot. Met the guys from OSU Open Source Lab, they are hosting our Alpha images for us. I got to talk to lots of other people too, including guys from wxWidgets, Eclipse, Blender, Crystal Space, Git, Gcc, OpenOffice, OGRE, RockBox, OpenStreetMap, Pidgin, Python, SIP Communicator, Sugar Labs and Wine. I also got a chance to talk with Jennifer Redman from Systers, she's a former BeOS user and has been keeping an eye on Haiku. All in all it was a fun weekend and met lots of people from many different projects and many different countries. Seeing that I've had interactions with a few via email it was cool to meet them in person.
We were also given copies of the GSoC manual, which was written in under a week:
http://en.flossmanuals.net/GSoCMentoringGuide
Some Related Links:
http://gsoc-wiki.osuosl.org/index.php/Attendee_List_2009
http://gsoc-wiki.osuosl.org/index.php/Session_Notes_2009
Photo of the Non-Linux Meetup: http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthewdillon/4045600268/

We want news!

… or at least I suppose that some people want to know the progresses made on the WebKit port.
I think that we can split this work in two parts:

• Improvements made on the port.
• Landing in the official WebKit tree.

Ryan and I thought that the first part would have been a bit easier, but in fact since the previous port (by himself), many code in WebKit has changed. It is still a work-in-progress but I made some good advances.

As for the second part, it is also something that we are still working on. I can say that it is in great shape to be complete before the end of summer. ( The summer ends on the 21th of September… ;)

After much effort from my GSoC student Maxime Simon and plenty of gentle coaxing from WebKit reviewers, I'm proud to announce that the various patches to add support for Haiku as a platform in WebKit are now being committed!

Maxime took my code from the original Haiku port I made in 2007 and updated it for the latest WebKit, which changes a lot daily, so you can imagine the state of the port after a few years! Still it was good to see that my previous effort was not to be wasted and it did not take Maxime long to start posting bugs and patches at the WebKit Bugzilla site.

After a month of work, it's time to take a break and a step back to check on our progress.
And after a month what we have is a prototype of a multi-process browser.

Haiku Native Browser

Ryan and I had a dilemma: Where to start? In fact, there is a lot to do on this project.
So we decided to start with a multi-process browser prototype.