Open webOS: November Edition.

WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesùs.

From the Open webOS project Blog:

Open webOS: November Edition.

Warning this month’s post is pretty technical!

Back in September we announced a roadmap on what we would be working on next. The focus this month is on three significant SysMgr projects that will be completed in rapid sequence over the next month, plus one routine update.

Pluggable Keyboard Project

We have pulled the existing virtual keyboard logic out of “luna-sysmgr” into a new component “keyboard-efigs”.  This component supports either a tablet or phone-style virtual keyboard based on the familiar keyboard design for the HP Touchpad, supporting English, French, Italian, German and Spanish entry (hence “-efigs”)

This keyboard can be used as the basis for implementing different designs and locale support.  “luna-sysmgr” will be able to query multiple available keyboard modules and will select the best fit, based on the pixel dimensions of the display, the DPI and the locale.

This code change affected the following components and can be tested with the identified branches:

    luna-sysmgr      “unstable” branch

    luna-webkit-api “unstable” branch

    keyboard-efigs  “master” branch

We expect to complete our internal QA process by the end of November, and then we will roll over the “unstable” branches for “luna-webkit-api” and “luna-sysmgr” into the “master” branch, and switch the keyboard selection process over to this new method.

Qt 4.8.3 update

We are performing final testing on updating our Qt4.8.2 support to the latest upstream version of 4.8.3 and expect to post that before the end of November.

WebAppManager Separation Project

The existing “luna-sysmgr” component has two separate processes combined into one codebase, LunaSysMgr and WebAppMgr.  When LunaSysMgr loads, it currently immediately forks a copy of itself as WebAppMgr, and the two processes do different but complementary tasks, where WebAppMgr is responsible for running JavaScript applications and LunaSysMgr runs the rest of the system.  There are weird historical reasons for this and it greatly complicates the maintenance and enhancement of SysMgr components.

We have already completed the first phase of breaking out the WebAppManager codebase into the new component “webappmanager” and are now pruning the resulting obsolete code from “luna-sysmgr”.  This will still leave these two components with a significant set of common code, which we will progressively extract into a new shared library component “luna-sysmgr-common”.

Once the “unstable” branch of “luna-sysmgr” is released from the Pluggable Keyboard project, we will immediately reuse that branch for these changes and ensure their visibility and of the ongoing development of the new “luna-sysmgr-common” component.

This code change will affect the following components and will become testable with the identified branches:        

    luna-sysmgr      “unstable” branch

    luna-sysmgr-common “master” branch

    webappmanager  “master” branch

We expect to complete our internal QA process in early December and then we will roll over the “unstable” branch for “luna-sysmgr” into the “master” branch, and have a substantially reduced codebase for “luna-sysmgr” focused on the traditional responsibilities of the LunaSysMgr process.

Qt5/WebKit2 Upgrade for SysMgr Components Project

Early in December we will begin the complex process of updating the following SysMgr components from Qt4.8/WebKit1 to be based on Qt5/WebKit2 and we expect to complete the process by the end of that month:   “luna-sysmgr”, “luna-sysmgr-common”, “keyboard-efigs”, “smartkey-hun” and “webappmanager”.

We expect the bulk of the effort will be related to supporting Qt5 in the build system, updating the QPAs to work with Qt5, and of modifying “luna-sysmgr” and “webappmanager” to convert deprecated Qt4.8 capabilities to their Qt5 equivalents.

Once the WebAppManager Separation Project has reached a stable point early in December, and the “unstable” branch of “luna-sysmgr” has again been rolled up into the “master” branch, you will begin seeing the Qt5 conversion work appearing in the “unstable” branches of these five components.

Interested in contributing?

Join us in the forums, mailinglist or IRC to discuss these topics and many more. Of course you can also join the engineering team and get paid to work on your favorite open source project. Head on over to ourjobs page and browse through the great opportunities available.

Enyo 2.1.1

We are also pleased to announce the latest Enyo release. Version 2.1.1. offers Tier-1 support for IE 10 and Kindle Fire HD. This follow’s last month release of 2.1, which supports Chrome on Android and iOS 6. You can read more about 2.1.1 over on the Enyo blog.

Out and about

We are packing in lots of events to end the year. Come join us at QT developer days in Santa Clara Dec 5-7th. Our very own Chief Architect Steve Winston will be giving a talk on Friday about the importance of QT for Open webOS. We will also have a booth displaying some of the ports that community members have been working on. Also on the schedule is mHeath in Washington, DC from Dec. 3-5 where we will be talking about cross-platform design in healthcare. Enyo guru Kevin Schaaf will be giving a talk on Encapsulating the Web at dotjs in Paris.

As always we look forward to meeting you either online or in person and your feedback is definitely welcome.

Open webOS