WebKit | Haiku Project

WebKit weekly report #1

Blog post by PulkoMandy on Fri, 2013-09-27 08:56

cmake, contract work, distcc, WebKit, webpositive

Hey, it's Friday already !

So, now that I'm (mostly) done moving and I have set up my workplace (including internet access, electricity, and everything required), I can finally start doing some actual work on WebKit. So, what's hapenned this week ? Well, actually, not that much.

A quick reminder, you can follow the commits on the bnetapi branch of haiku-webkit repo at github.

I've also set up a Gist TODO list so you can see things I want to work on. Please send me comments about websites that don't work well, I'll add them to the list and see what can be done.

More news from WebPositive

Blog post by PulkoMandy on Thu, 2013-09-12 17:03

contract work, WebKit, webpositive

Hi everyone,
It's been two weeks since the previous blog post, so here goes an update.

First of all, I wanted to make it clear that I haven't started to work on my contract, so the few things that happened in the last two weeks were done on my free time. Said free time was short, as I'm in the process of moving to another city and I've been packing a lot of stuff and cleaning my flat. Note I will be offline starting next week, and I hope to get internet access back as soon as possible. I won't start working on the contract before I'm back online, as testing a web browser without any internet access creates more problems than I'm willing to solve.

Unexpected

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

contract work, webpositive, WebKit

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

contract work, WebKit, webpositive

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 a bit more stable

Blog post by stippi on Fri, 2010-04-16 14:39

native browser, WebKit, webpositive, contract work

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.

WebPositive gets polishing

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

native browser, WebKit, webpositive, contract work

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!