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.

Everything ready for the WebKitGTK+ Hackfest

During the past weeks, Xan and myself have been busy putting together everything for the WebKitGTK+ Hackfest, which will take place next week at Igalia‘s offices in the beautiful city of Corunna.

The original idea for this event arose a few months ago. We have a team of Igalians working full-time, together with other members of the community, in completing and improving GNOME’s WebKit port, and we thought that it would be a good idea to propose ourselves to host a hackfest, which should turn out to be very productive for the project. After talking to the Foundation and all the core developers, we got such a positive feedback, that we decided to push it forward.

So we will have here all the most active WebKitGTK+ hackers, working together, in the same place, during 1 week (15th-21st of December), to make one of the (imho) most important components of our platform rock even more.

The hackfest is sponsored by Collabora and Igalia, and has the support of the GNOME Foundation, which covers about half of the total cost. Igalia will also take care of food&drinks for all the days, and will organize a nice dinner before the end of the event, so that people don’t leave the place without enjoying the famous local food. Of course, any last minute extra sponsor would be very welcome. So if your company cares about WebKit in GNOME, it is the right time to join and contribute.

Stay tunned, I will try to blog and tweet about the event as much as possible.

Igalia will have a stand at OSiM 2009

This week, from Monday to Thursday, I will go together with Alex and Xan to Amsterdam for the Open Source in Mobile 2009, an interesting conference where all the main companies using and producing open source in the mobile industry will meet to present and discuss their plans, and find collaboration opportunities.

After successfully attending the previous editions, we thought that it would be nice to go a step further and have our own stand there, in order to be able to share more easily our projects and solutions with the attendants. The organization has also kindly invited us to do a short public presentation about Igalia and to participate in a panel about the best ways to share code.

If you are interested in discussing cooperation around projects/technologies like Linux, Freedesktop.org, GNOME and WebKit, or around platforms like GNOME Mobile, Maemo, Moblin or LiMo, among others, please drop us a line or just come by our stand.