WebKitGTK+ hackfest wrap up

After more than 5 days of hacking, discussions and some social activities, the 3rd edition of the WebKitGTK+ hackfest, which took place at the Igalia office in A Coruña, is coming to its end. We are about to go for dinner and most people are leaving tomorrow early in the morning, so it is time  for wrapping up.

WebKitGTK+ 2011 Hackfest

In my opinion the hackfest has been a success both in terms of technical progress and consolidating a common vision within the team about the way forward both for WebKitGTK+ and Epiphany. The intense work we have been doing during the past 2 years has given its results, and unlike the previous two editions in 2009 and 2010, the topics defined in the agenda this time were not mainly about fixing critical and blocker bugs and implementing basic missing features, but about more ambitious and challenging goals, aiming to make WebKitGTK+ and Epiphany rock.

Examples of this are the progress achieved this week in several areas, including the Epiphany improvements & new design, a consolidated WebKit2 API (which will improve the performance and stability once used by the browsers and embedders), accelerated compositing support, improved HTML5 video support, better accessibility support, JSC improvements, HTML5 notifications, HTML5 history, better networking, new and more updated bots for the continuous integration, or developer documentation.

Besides taking care of many of the organizational bits, my contributions were focused on participating in the discussions about the new Epiphany UI and mainly on the integration of open web apps and HTML5 technologies within GNOME. I will be blogging very soon about how we see this integration happening and the initial proofs of concept that we have already started to implement.

WebKitGTK+ 2011 Hackfest

Finally, I would like to thank our sponsors (Collabora, Motorola and Igalia) and mainly the GNOME Foundation for their contributions. Without this support, getting together 20 hackers in the same room, taking care of them, and enabling all the progress we have had during the week would have been impossible.

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