Year: 2011

On April several developers from our team had the chance to attend the WebKit contributors meeting in Cupertino, I’ve spent a couple of more days in San Francisco to take advantage of the long trip and spend some time hacking with Martin and Xan.

It is always a good moment to catch up with the people in the WebKit community and think about your position and motivation in the project. I would like to thank the Apple team for making it happen. We talked about WebKit2, not all the decisions are made and things like C API could change its design in the future, stay tuned. We are pushing WebKit2GTK+ and now it is more complete and it is easier to contribute to. We even have landed the test runner patch, and now running tests is possible.

We also did some hacking, fixed some issues in WebKitGTK and prepared 1.4.0 release, the new stable release that includes most of the work we have done the last year. All the tests that are passing now have made this new stable release a better library, it is easy to realize about it after spending some time using the browser. It is clear that software needs taking care of the small details, if you want someone to use it, and that takes time and effort. Our team in Igalia has made a good work creating the best WebKitGTK+ release so far. We have come from a big file with skipped tests to more than 22.000 tests passed and that is a huge difference that the final user can check.

I hope more people can enjoy the software and contribute to the code, this is one of the reasons free software rocks.

After some months of cleaning, fixing and landing all the required patches (some provided by Motorola devs), yesterday we landed the last one adding the shared memory support, so you can safely download and compile WebKit2 with GTK+ using the trunk of the WebKit svn. Just add –enable-webkit2 to the compilation configuration of your choice and you’ll get a small MiniBrowser implemented with WebKit2 C API.

Basic feature of this new API is that it uses a split process architecture, the UI is separated from the web content in a different process. It means a lot of pros and some cons, currently at Igalia we are ready to face the cons so we can get all the pros, creating more stable and responsive applications using the port. Our plan is to add the complete support and make Epiphany work with it at some point.

We are also adding WebKitTestRunner support which will help a lot with the development. Besides the C API we are implementing a GTK+ friendly API, basically we are using the WebKit1 API over the WebKit2 C API, so you can even test it with the GtkLauncher and your own GNOME application easily.

Of course we are not going to forget about all the gardening work we are doing, maintaining, releasing and improving the core GTK+ port.

The code and APIs are still development status, there is still a lot of work to do, so just use them for testing purposes, this is just the initial step and we hope after this a lot of people can contribute to make the port rock even more.