A new development contractor!

News posted on Sun, 2012-05-20 16:03

hiring, haiku inc., donations, contracting

Announcing development contracts is one of the best feelings. It is a time when a volunteer developer is given the opportunity to dedicate a large block of time for their hobby -- developing HAIKU! This is made possible through the countless donations from people like you, who love Haiku and are willing to give what is right for them, to make Haiku a better operating system. Thank you to all of our supporters, both public and anonymous!

This time, we are pleased to announce that Alexandre Deckner will be working on the WebKit port and, if time allows, WebPositive. You may remember "aldeck" primarily from his work on Tracker -- squashing bugs, rewriting sections for better performance and updating it to utilize the Layout API. As Alexandre states, "Good web support is something crucial for any operating system these days, it is for some users the main software they will use on a computer and one of the first things a new user will try on Haiku. To summarize, Haiku has to provide the best web experience possible and i believe i can help to go in that direction."

Alexandre's contract will be for 160 hours during one month for €2,000 EUR. The current exchange rate at Oanda.com (which is used by Haiku, Inc.) is about $2,554 USD. He expects most of the time will be used for bringing the WebKit port back up to date.

If you appreciate this contract and would like to see more, please consider supporting Haiku, Inc.. As always, Haiku, Inc. is eager to consider contracts that further Haiku, even for non-C/C++ tasks that help pave the way towards R1.

Comments

Re: A new development contractor!

by tqh - 2012-05-20 17:19

Oh nice.

Re: A new development contractor!

by humdinger - 2012-05-20 17:42

Fantastic! An improved WebKit / WebPositive is money very well spent indeed.

I hope by the end (or maybe after an extention?) of your contract, Web+ can move into the Haiku trunk. I feel that even small development and bugfixes are more attractive to the small time dev there.

Looking forward reading of your progress, Alex!

Regards,
Humdinger

Re: A new development contractor!

by franxico - 2012-05-20 18:04

Very nice!

Re: A new development contractor!

by cipri - 2012-05-20 20:12

That it mean, that a full-port is intended? (html5 included)

Indeed webkit is crucial. Are the any hopes that one could consider trying to port chrome? I like how the data synchronization works in chrome. I know that it's hightly non-realistic, but i still home for a port of chrome one day. :)

Re: A new development contractor!

by aldeck - 2012-05-20 22:46

Wow that was fast :-)
I"m truly honored, this is really a chance for me to work the the things i love and hopefully a chance for Haiku to provide a better web experience. I would like to thank all the donators and Haiku Inc. for making it possible. I'd like to also thank the well alive and supportive Haiku community. Special thanks goes to Matt Madia who's been working hard on the various developer programs and fundraising front and for maintaining the link between the community and the contributors!

Best regards,
Alex

PS: I plan to officially start the contract on may 28 though this isn't yet confirmed with Haiku inc.

Re: A new development contractor!

by Bruno Brocoli - 2012-05-21 09:21

Oho, very good news.

Since some html5 is yet supportet, you could try to get some more points compaired to qupzillas webkitbrowserscore as of 285...
haikuware.com/directory/view-details/development/app-installation...

and use some browsercheck like:
html5test.com/

or get the acid test done by 100 points. acid3.acidtests.org/

But I am sure you know already what you are going to work on...

Very good news and good luck...

Re: A new development contractor!

by vooshy - 2012-05-21 17:31

Congratulations aldeck, hope you've signed up to the mailing list and had some back reading of the past.
http://www.freelists.org/list/haiku-webkit

As a contributor to Haiku Inc. would it be beneficial for me to donate in euro's instead of dollar's to remove the need for conversion or is it just the way in which funds are processed at the moment?

Re: A new development contractor!

by mmadia - 2012-05-21 20:51

Whichever currency incurs the least fees for you is fine. There are a few different options for paying contractors available to Haiku, Inc. -- so there is a degree of flexibility.

Re: A new development contractor!

by codewrangler - 2012-05-22 18:05

Alexandre,

Since you are going to be looking at it....

In the R1 Alpha 3 version of Webpositive, I get the error message, "Failed writing received data to disk/application", when trying to login into cpanel on "www.fastdomain.com/cgi-gin/cplogin".

I have not tried any of the nightly builds. So, I am using the "release" version of R1 Alpha 3.

Michael

Re: A new development contractor!

by anevilyak - 2012-05-23 12:58

Have you filed a ticket for that? Comments on articles really aren't a good place to keep track of such issues.

Re: A new development contractor!

by codewrangler - 2012-05-24 15:01

Done. :-)

https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/8598

Re: A new development contractor!

by tangobravo - 2012-05-30 07:20

Hey Alex,

Great news! You may remember the thread on the mailing list a couple of months ago where I was discussing a Cairo/Skia port and how that might help to keep Haiku's webkit up-to-date. Any thoughts on that? It seemed the other alternative would be to massively extend the BeAPI to support all the various gradients, line dashes, transformations etc which are needed by modern CSS (supported by AGG in the app server, but would need to be exposed through the BeAPI). Either of those are likely to be more that a month of work though, and just getting the existing code base to compile based on a newer webkit may well eat up all of your time. Best of luck anyway!

Simon