Submitted by “It looks like the Haiku Webkit port initiated by Ryan Leavengood has entered a productive second stage of development, and thanks to the recent work by one of the new project team members, Andrea ‘xeD’ Anzani, tangible progress has been made as shown by the recent screenshot showing the HaikuLauncher application rendering bebits.com. I was curious about his work, so I went directly to the source and asked a few questions to Andrea; here are his answers.” On a related note, Haiku now has a new nightly build archive.
to finally browse the internet in Haiku
Greatest news possible for the project. Quoting ICO: “Santa Came Early This Year”
Meanwhile you can use Links, which now display graphics under Haiku:
http://joomla.iscomputeron.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=vi…
When I said LoseThos has links in source code. They are local file links which can be entered by naming a source code symbol (or naming a file or string in a file or an anchor in a file). If you need to document a reference to a function or symbol, you hit CTRL-L, select “link” and enter the symbol name. Then, you have a link which others can click to go there.
I did a physics program and drew a little vector graphic right in the source code to help document. It handles superscripts and subscripts. Everything goes in one file, so you don’t have annoying little graphic files. You can output the graphics during run-time, too — no separate resource files.
Imagine source code being a Word document instead of ASCII. Does Word support file links… I don’t know.
Everything uses the same document format — the command line supports links, graphics, trees, macros… the menu system does, forms do, the help system does, the clip-board. It’s seamlessly integrated.
http://www.losethos.com
Edited 2007-12-25 20:16
i just dont see how haiku/beos will keep going if it really takes such effort to port something so easily portable.
amazing work and my criticism is not targeted at the developers in any way but at the platform and its direction.
its my understanding that a lot of legacy stuff (old apps) need to keep working.
Edited 2007-12-23 18:42
Are you really sure it’s so easily portable? Don’t misunderstand me, please, I don’t intend to be offensive. I think that the portability of such a complex framework depends on the dependencies (sorry!) with the “external” software modules used by the code.
BeOS is such a different platform, it “lacks” some of the required packages or API functions (because it follows a different approach, being *completely* object oriented, with a different API). So the developers have to implement a lot of glue code (I think!) and this is the difficult part.
Thanks for all the time spent by those invaluable developers for the steady continuous improvement to Haiku.
Edited 2007-12-23 19:14
There’s a useful distinction that the Be Inc. engineers used to make regarding portability: there’s a difference between software that is portable and software that has been ported.
Webkit is quite portable, for a browser. You can emphasize the first part of that sentence, or the last. Still, it’s not exactly news that it’s more difficult to port programs to Haiku, because the OS’s API is fairly different from most others. That’s really what makes Haiku interesting, though.
how is being different interesting? is it better in your mind simply because it is different or is there something technically superior to its development process (for apps)?
It encourages highly multi-threaded apps, which used to important for responsiveness, and is now increasingly important due to consumers cpus having multiple cores.
Whether it’s actually superior, I’ll leave to devs who have actually developed on it. I think many have complained that it’s more difficult to develop with, but perhaps give a superior end-user experience.
Well, it would be easier to port stuff if Haiku became a Linux clone, but then why would anyone want to use it rather than Linux? As for the API, I like it, but I don’t know any other APIs so I can’t compare. It is easy to learn/use though (the transition from Java to C++ was more difficult for a newbie dev like me).
how is being different interesting?
Did you just ask that in public?…
And where did the poster say that “interesting” equated to “better”?
As for porting “portable” apps – you seem a little bit dense to believe that it shouldn’t be difficult… Maybe it’s portable to the top three operating systems out there, but that’s only because many developers have made sure to keep it that way. Bringing a “portable” app to a new platform surely requires work, especially if all the libraries and dependencies it uses are not already ported to that platform as well.
It seems like instead of trolling, you should maybe be content with news about your current platform of choice. Clearly reading about different operating systems with different APIs couldn’t possibly aspire to your interests.
From the context, I would assume that smitty meant: many of the aspects which make BeOS / Haiku interesting lie in its differences from other OSes, not that it’s different solely for the sake of being different.
It’s a subtle distinction, but an important one. I always thought that the “think different” ads were stupid for that exact reason – the type of nonsense that appeals to faux-intellectuals who think that being blindly anti-populist is the same thing as having discerning tastes (while failing to realize the irony that blind contrarianism is just as intellectually-lazy as blind conformity).
That’s one particular thing I’ve always liked about the BeOS community – it’s largely free of those sorts of pretentions, at least IME.
not that it’s different solely for the sake of being different.
True… If the API was “different” only by transposing all the characters around to make all the function names different – I think everyone would turn up their nose and walk away… so if that’s what he meant, then I agree – that’s not interesting.
However, BeOS/Haiku is “different” in a new sort of way, which is exactly what sparks the interest of people searching for something less ordinary – something thought provoking – something that challenges the way things are usually done in an effort to find a “better way”.
What’s up with the “snow” animation on the Haiku website?
Yeah it’s really, really annoying… I’m trying to find out who added it on #haiku and see if they can restrict the animation to the header img or something, as it makes reading the text quite annoying at the moment :/.
Ah, so you are not using NoScript, then
Yeah it’s really, really annoying… I’m trying to find out who added it on #haiku and see if they can restrict the animation to the header img or something, as it makes reading the text quite annoying at the moment :/.
What version of Bah Humbug are you using? 😉
Looking forward to this. I’ve just spent the morning trying to get the BONE version of Firefox running on my Haiku partition. I’ve edited UserSetupEnvironment but it’s moaning about .so.stub files. And of course, I hear it doesn’t run for long even when it runs…
I’ve edited UserSetupEnvironment but it’s moaning about .so.stub files.
You can safely ignore those errors – they’re somewhat of a hack for BeOS – the Haiku runtime loader complains about them, but they’re harmless.
The stubs was a trick to get round the limited addon memory (32MB for all apps) that BeOS had. Additional libs will be loaded to that memory, but by only loading stubs that were linked to the real libs none of that to limited memory was used.
If it don’t find the stub library it loads the real library, which is ok under Haiku.
Btw IMO don’t edit the startup-script. Repackage:
http://community.livejournal.com/bezilla/255563.html
Also this is what you can expect:
http://community.livejournal.com/bezilla/257711.html
Edited 2007-12-25 09:35
@TQH, umccullough
Thanks for the information. The launch must be failing after that, then. I don’t suppose this debug output gives any clue?
Loaded symbols for /boot/beos/apps/firefox/components/libxpinstall.so
[tcsetpgrp failed in terminal_inferior: Invalid Argument]
[Switching to team ./firefox (175) thread firefox (175)]
0x0165353d in PR_NewPollableEvent () from /boot/home/config/lib/libnspr4.so
Chris
Nothing I’ve seen before.
Sent the processor to 100% and made the machine unresponsive on Konqueror.
Sidenote: That’s funny. I keep hearing how platforms utilizing Konqueror for instance has been ready for the desktop for years, and now I hear that rendering a normal website is a problem. Wow, that’s amazing!
Gee, guess 2k8 will also be a year of the rumours of “being ready”….
Mainnote: It’s great seeing options and improvements happening all over the place in the Haiku world. I personally would’ve hoped to see Alpha R1 before Christmas, but that didn’t happen. Anyway, you can’t have it all, and concluding that it won’t happen in 2k7, I’m more sure than ever that Haiku will start pondering Alphas under 2k8. Meaning basically, it’ll be the year where a real Win/Osx alternative was born, even though it will take plenty of more years for maturity!