WebKit

It’s been more than 2 years since the last time I wrote something here, and in that time a lot of things happened. Among those, one of the main highlights was me moving back to Igalia’s WebKit team, but this time I moved as part of Igalia’s support infrastructure to help with other types of tasks such as general coordination, team facilitation and project management, among other things. On top of those things, I’ve been also presenting our work around WebKit in different venues, such as in the Embedded Open Source Summit or in the Embedded Recipes conference, for instance. Of course, that included presenting our work in the WebKit community as part of the WebKit Contributors Meeting, a small and technically focused event that happens every year, normally around the Bay Area (California). That’s often a pretty dense presentation where, over the course of 30-40 minutes, we go through all the main areas that we at Igalia contribute to in WebKit, trying to summarize our main contributions in the previous 12 months. This includes work not just from the WebKit team, but also from other ones such as our Web Platform, Compilers or Multimedia teams. ...

I haven’t blogged in a while -mostly due to lack of time, as usual- but I thought I’d write something today to let the world know about one of the things I’ve worked on a bit during this week, while remotely attending the Web Engines Hackfest from home: Setting up an environment for cross-compiling WebKit2GTK+ for ARM I know this is not new, nor ground-breaking news, but the truth is that I could not find any up-to-date documentation on the topic in a any public forum (the only one I found was this pretty old post from the time WebKitGTK+ used autotools), so I thought I would devote some time to it now, so that I could save more in the future. Of course, I know for a fact that many people use local recipes to cross-compile WebKit2GTK+ for ARM (or simply build in the target machine, which usually takes a looong time), but those are usually ad-hoc things and hard to reproduce environments locally (or at least hard for me) and, even worse, often bound to downstream projects, so I thought it would be nice to try to have something tested with upstream WebKit2GTK+ and publish it on trac.webkit.org, ...

It’s certainly been a while since I attended this event for the last time, 2 years ago, when it was a WebKitGTK+ only oriented hackfest, so I guess it was a matter of time it happened again… It will be different for me this time, though, as now my main focus won’t be on accessibility (yet I’m happy to help with that, too), but on fixing a few issues related to the WebKit2GTK+ API layer that I found while working on our platform (Endless OS), mostly related to its implementation of accelerated compositing. ...

First of all, let me be clear: no, I’m not trying to leave Emacs again, already got over that stage. Emacs is and will be my main editor for the foreseeable future, as it’s clear to me that there’s no other editor I feel more comfortable with, which is why I spent some time cleaning up my .emacs.d and making it more “manageable”. But as much as like Emacs as my main “weapon”, I sometimes appreciate the advantages of using a different kind of beast for specific purposes. And, believe me or not, in the past 2 years I learned to love Eclipse/CDT as the best work-mate I know when I need some extra help to get deep inside of the two monster C++ projects that WebKit and Chromium are. And yes, I know Eclipse is resource hungry, slow, bloated… and whatnot; but I’m lucky enough to have fast SSDs and lots of RAM in my laptop & desktop machines, so that’s not really a big concern anymore for me (even though I reckon that indexing chromium in the laptop takes “quite some time”), so let’s move on :-) ...

I have a chrooted environment in my 64bit Fedora 22 machine that I use every now and then to work on a debian-like 32bit system where I might want to do all sorts of things, such as building software for the target system or creating debian packages. More specifically, today I was trying to build WebKitGTK+ 2.8.3 in there and something weird was happening: The following CMake snippet was not properly recognizing my 32bit chroot: ...

As many other WebKitGTK+ hackers (30 in total), I flew last Saturday to A Coruña to attend the 5th edition of the WebKitGTK+ Hackfest, hosted once again by Igalia at their premises and where people from several different affiliations gathered together to try to give our beloved port a boost. As for me, I flew there to work mainly on accessibility related issues, making the most of the fact that both Joanie (Orca maintainer) and Piñeiro (ATK maintainer) would be there too, so it should be possible to make things happen faster, specially discussion-wise. ...

It seems that one can never stop learning new things with git, no matter for how long you’ve been using it (in my case, I’m a proud git user since 2008), because today I added a new trick to my toolbox, that already proved to be quite useful: “grepping” files in a git repository, as you would do it with git grep, but using a commit-id to limit the search to a specific snapshot of your project. ...

As I mentioned in my previous post before GUADEC, I’ve been putting some effort lately on trying to improve the accessibility layer of WebKitGTK+, as part of my work here at Samsung, and one of the main things I’ve worked on was the removal of the dependency we had on Pango and GAIL to implement the atk_text_get_text_*_offset() family of functions for the different text boundaries. And finally, I’m really happy to say that such a task is complete once and for all, meaning that now those functions should work as well or as bad on WebKit2GTK+ as they do in WebKitGTK+, so the weird behaviour described in bug 73433 is no longer an issue. You can check I’m not lying by just taking a look to the commit that removed both all trace of Pango and GAIL in the code, as well as and the one that removed the GAIL dependency from the build system. And if you want more detail, just feel free to check the whole dependency tree in WebKit’s bugzilla. ...

One year again GUADEC is approaching and, also again, I’m very happy to say that I’ll be there as well this time, even if I have to recognize it was not on my plans for this year, at least not initially. And the reason why it was not initially in my plans was mainly because I’ve been already through quite some changes during these past months year, and my family just came over to the UK two months ago. This means that, even I already arrived by the beginning of the year, we just started to settle here as a family a few weeks ago. So in that context, I didn’t feel like leaving them alone for one week already now, it definitely would look like a “wrong management of priorities” to me. ...

It turns out I’m writing this post at 6:00 AM in the morning from a hotel instead of doing it at a more reasonable time from my comfy home or a nice cafeteria. That’s already quite a new thing by itself, and the reason for that is not that I became crazy or something, but the fact that I’m completely jet-lagged in California right now in order to attend my second WebKit Contributors Meeting (my first time was in 2011), this time as part of the Samsung team in the UK R&D center, together with my mate Anton Obzhirov. ...

This past week I’ve spent some time explaining to my mates at Samsung the basics about how accessibility works and is implemented in WebKitGTK+. I realized, yet again, of how messy and confusing everything can be the first time you encounter these things. After all, WebKit is quite a complex project already and accessibility is not a simple matter either. In order to help them better understand this topic, I wrote a summary to have as reference that explains in my own words which the main pieces of the whole puzzle are, and how they relate to one another. In my experience, it’s not always easy to understand the big picture quickly, and I think this kind of documentation can be quite useful for anyone willing to contribute to accessibility in WebKitGTK+. At least it would have been useful for me when I started working on this. I only regret not having written it before, but better late than never, right? ...

So, after almost 3 months of “holidays”, I’ve finally started working on my new job this Tuesday in Samsung Electronics Research Institute UK (aka SERI), where I’ll join a team mainly working in A/V and DTV related stuff while, at the same time, I’ll keep contributing to WebKit and WebKitGTK+. As you can imagine, being the first week means that I mostly spent my time learning a lot of stuff about my new job and the tools I’d be using, as well as setting up my development environment and getting to know my colleagues and the things we’ll be working on. ...

Two months ago it was an important day for me. It was the day that I finally told my partners at Igalia that I’d be leaving the company, after almost seven years. It hasn’t been an easy decision to make and so this hasn’t been an easy post to write either… yet one I’d like to write anyway. But let’s push the rewind button for a moment now… I’ve joined Igalia on November 2005, initially as a trainee while I was finishing my studies of Computer Science Engineering, and got quickly hooked by the company, the people that was part of it back then and the kind of project they were trying to build. ...

As you might already know, the new and shiny 3.6 release of the GNOME desktop is right around the corner, and so it’s the next release of WebKitGTK+, the port of the WebKit web rendering engine to the GTK+ platform. And it turns out that such a release is going to be a very special one for us, members of the WebKit team at Igalia, since it comes with some very interesting features, like those I already mentioned in the talk I gave during the past GUADEC, mainly: ...

It seems this year GUADEC is going to be pretty close to my place and so I will surely attend, but this time I won’t go by plane but by bike, which since some months ago has become my main vehicle for moving around the beautiful city where I live in: A Coruña. Also, besides hanging around the venue and trying to help as much as possible as the local I am, I’ll be talking about WebKitGTK+ in the afternoon on Thursday 26th, so feel free to come round the room if you feel curious about the current status of the whole thing and the current plans for the short and medium term, which are mostly focused around WebKit2 and the roadmap we’re already following. ...

Some time ago I wrote a (very!) small android application to scratch an itch I had: being able to easily check the status of WebKit buildbots right from my phone, which turned out to be quite useful in some scenarios. And no, I’m not the kind of guy that does the “Land Patch / Goes Home” thing, but sometimes you see yourself in the situation of having to leave your workplace before than expected and after having committed certain kind of patches a while ago. And in such a situation WebKit Watcher has proved to be a helpful tool many times, at least to me. ...

So it seems I’m going to FOSDEM this year (yay!), together with a bunch of other Igalians who will be attending as well, coming from different places from across the globe (well, mainly from Europe this time). I know some people will probably disagree with me on this, but for me FOSDEM is one of the greatest events of this kind, and so I’m quite happy to go there this time, specially after not being able to attend last year due to some unexpected (and unavoidable) personal matters. ...

As Piñeiro already mentioned in some posts, last week a bunch of hackers attended the ATK/AT-SPI Hackfest 2012 here at the Igalia offices, in the lovely city of Coruña. As the guy working on accessibility support for WebKitGTK+, I attended the hackfest to join some other great people representing different projects, such as Mozilla, Orca, AT-SPI, ATK, GTK+ and Qt. So, apart from helping with some “local” organizational details of the hackfest and taking some pictures, I spent some time hacking in WebKitGTK+’s accessibility code and participating in some discussions. ...

Some posts have been already published about this during the last days, but just in case you missed them I will mention it here again: Last week, a bunch of hackers gathered together in the Igalia office in Coruña for the third edition of the WebKitGTK+ hackfest , and a lot of work has been done, as Juanjo has already summarized in his “WebKitGTK+ hackfest wrap up” post. ...

Last May, I wrote about some initial tests I did back then with AtkSocket and AtkPlug, just to learn a bit about that API that allows connecting accessibility trees in different processes, thanks to the magic of the ATK bridge. I did that in order to prepare for the work that would probably be needed when adding accessibility support in WebKit2GTK+, so browsers using the new version of this web engine could be at least as much accessible as those using the single-process WebKitGTK+ library. Looking back, I think that the effort has definitely payed off… ...