Alp Toker

With the revised deadline for Google Summer of Code ‘08 student applications looming, we’ve been getting a lot of interest in browser-related student projects. I’ve put together a list of some of my favourite ideas.

• GNOME ideas
  • Epiphany
    • Desktop integration
    • Bookmark and history integration
    • JavaScript debugger based on Drosera / Web Inspector
  • Evolution
    • Bug tracking aid
  • Empathy
    • WebKit Adium theme support
  • Desktop widgets
  • Integrated web app launcher
• WebKit ideas
  • Cairo SVG backend completion
  • GTK+ port test suite completion
• Mono ideas
  • WebKit-based HTML editor

If in doubt, now’s the time to submit proposals. Already-listed ideas are the most likely to get mentored but students are free to propose their own ideas as well. Proposals for incremental improvements will tend to be favoured over ideas for completely new applications, but a proof of concept and/or roadmap can help when submitting plans for larger projects.

Update: There’s no need to keep asking about the status of an application on IRC/private mail etc. It’s a busy time for the upstream developers but they’ll get back in touch as soon as possible.

Sunday came and went in Birmingham. This was an opportunity to meet many of my colleagues at Collabora face to face for the first time.

Managed D-Bus talk went very well. Huge interest from the usual suspects, but also from the wider GNOME community. Packed room, engaging audience.

Sundays are usually quite boring, but this one was an exception. After talks, lead a jazz crawl across the pubs and bars of the city — it seems we caught the end of the 23rd Birmingham International Jazz Festival 2007.

Download Managed D-Bus talk slides

The WebKit Gtk+/Cairo port has recently had a burst of activity — it’s really starting to shape up. Now employed by Collabora, I’ve had the opportunity to coordinate my efforts on the port and in the last couple of weeks we’ve provided patches for over a dozen bug reports (often requests for enhancement) . Most importantly, we’ve decided to work with the WebKit team to keep contributions going directly into the upstream SVN repository — no more dead-end forks and “development branches”.

I started working on the port half a year ago after giving up on gtkmozembed in a fit of frustration and was immediately impressed by the competence of the WebKit team and the abstractions they’ve made on top of the browser core to make porting a breeze — WebKit boasts successful and actively maintained “ports” to Qt, Wx, Gtk+, Mac OS X and Windows. These guys know what they’re doing and have rapidly learnt how to lead a successful Open Source project. Porters often work together and each of the ports share various modules and backends — GNOME developers are known to work with qmake, KDE hackers have picked up amounts of Gtk+ knowhow and Apple engineers often provide build fixes and small feature enhancements for the contributed modules.

The engine is incredibly versatile, and, as the name suggests, one of its strong points is seamless integration into existing desktop applications. We are concentrating on the mobile GNOME platform right now, and even without any profiling, the prototype browser is competitive with Opera, particularly for complex interactive sites using AJAX and modern CSS features. Moreover, we see a future for WebKit as a component of new applications like Banter that are blurring the boundaries between rich Web content and the GNOME desktop.

One of our upcoming contributions will add support for WebKit’s KSVG2-based SVG functionality using Cairo:

This is distinct from existing Cairo SVG libraries like librsvg in that JavaScript has full access to the DOM here, much like the current Gecko development trunk.