Hi Luciano, This appears to be a big step forward. I am especially interested in the notion of design freedom you speak of. Looking forward to seeing this upstreamed.
enjoy, Karen. On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 09:41:27AM -0300, Luciano Wolf wrote: > The openBossa team at INdT Brazil is proud to announce “Nix” - a new > WebKit2 port based on POSIX and OpenGL. Nix stands for “WebKit for > unix-like platforms” and, if you consider the German meaning of the > word "nix", it can be taken as “WebKit plus nothing”. We are looking > forward to upstreaming and maintaining this port. Below you will find > a brief history about Nix, besides its main goals and motivation. > > > :: A little bit of history :: > > The first of Nix basic ideas arose from a conversation between Kenneth > Rohde Christiansen and Noam Rosenthal, who were wondering about the > idea of having a “platform/glib” or platform/posix”. Other ports such > as EFL, GTK and Qt would then be able to develop themselves on top of > it, having a common source core. > > While QtWebKit’s QQuickWebView is great for embedding web content into > QtQuick, a few people felt they needed more freedom to implement a > different WebView behavior than the one being provided by Qt. Behavior > more suitable for tricky use cases like embedding web content in a 3D > world, for example. A private API called QRawWebView was implemented > to fulfil this gap. > > Motivated by the 2 aforementioned concepts and by the idea of having a > “lightweight” GL based port for developing some prototypes on a > RaspberryPi, in August 2012 Caio Oliveira and Jesus Sanchez-Palencia, > long term WebKit developers and former INdT employees, kick-started > what they called WebKitNix. They started from the EFL port, took out > every EFL-specific piece of code, implemented a “raw” GL-based > WebView, provided a C API in the WK2 fashion and a set of > platform/device APIs based on the former Chromium’s Source/Platform. > > We can summarize its evolutionary process as: > > 1. Initial idea: platform/posix or platform/glib (share code); > 2. Evolved problem: we wanted to have different behaviors for > QQuickWebView -> Qt Raw WebView > 3. Network: QtWebKit + Soup experiment > 4. Efl Raw WebView experiment > 5. Efl Without Efl :) > 6. Nix was born. > > :: What is inside it? :: > > Most of Nix’s building pieces are shared with other existing ports: > CMake build system, GLib, libsoup and Cairo. Also, it uses Coordinated > Graphics, Tiled Backing Store and existing WebKit2 C APIs. Having such > a tiny WebKit API means that Nix has the smallest possible footprint > on the rest of the WebKit project. > > We take seriously the notion that the WebKit project is for a web > rendering engine and nothing else, and try to develop as much of the > auxiliary features as possible outside the WebKit project, on top of > the API or in the injected bundle. > > Nix is already covered by Layout Tests, API Tests (TestWebKitAPI) and > Ref Tests which are run by our buildbot[1]. Perf tests are supported > but we don’t have a buildbot ready for them at this time. Pixel Tests > are on the way. Today we have around 75% of layout tests coverage. > > We have been merging Nix with webkit.org three times per week so it is > kept up-to-date. There is a public repository[2] with the original git > history and we are looking forward to upstreaming it. (Yes, we fulfill > all the “requirements” defined by the “Successful Port How To” > document[3]) > > :: Who should use it? :: > > It targets whoever wants to have a hardware accelerated WebKit2 port > on UNIX based devices, with a minimum effort. Nix is now running on > x86 and ARM (Raspberry Pi[4] is a supported platform). > > Flexibility and freedom is guaranteed: you can define your WebView > behavior and there’s no toolkit attached, so it may be used with EFL, > GTK, Qt or even no toolkit at all. > > :: Who’s working on it now? :: > > This port was made in openBossa - an open source research group in > Brazil. Nowadays, the team comprehends 5 WebKit committers and 4 more > developers. In January, several contributors from the university of > Szeged have joined the project as well, and are responsible for many > valuable contributions like the current work to switch to libcurl. > > :: Past and Future :: > > - 2012 - > - August/September: Lab phase, lots of experiments; > - October/November: Branching; > - late November: test infrastructure running; > - 2013 - > - January: public repository[2]; > - May: comments/discussions/objections -> upstreaming; > -June & beyond: maintenance, expand test coverage, focus on the web > platform (contributing to WebCore). > > :: Where can you find it? :: > > website: webkitnix.openbossa.org > buildbots: webkitnix.openbossa.org/build/ > code: https://github.com/WebKitNix/webkitnix > contact: n...@openbossa.org > IRC: #webkitnix at freenode > > > Best regards, > Nix/openBossa team > > [1] http://webkitnix.openbossa.org/build/ > [2] https://github.com/WebKitNix/webkitnix > [3] http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/SuccessfulPortHowTo > [4] https://github.com/WebKitNix/nix-rpi-sdk > _______________________________________________ > webkit-dev mailing list > webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org > https://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-dev --- end quoted text --- -- Karen Shaeffer Neuralscape, Mountain View, CA 94040 _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org https://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-dev