CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2014/OSS M1450 vda
Implement Window.sessionStorage
This wiki page contains details on the work done for the initial step of the task Implement Window.sessionStorage
for the Mozilla research project Servo.
Introduction
Rust
Rust is a modern systems programming language focusing on safety and speed to build reliable and efficient systems <ref> http://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/intro.html </ref>. It accomplishes the goals of memory safe without using garbage collection and it supports concurrency and parallelism in building platforms.
Rust’s lightweight task mechanism also promises to allow fine-grained isolation between browser components, such as tabs and extensions, without the need for expensive runtime protection schemes, like operating system process isolation. <ref> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/research/projects/ </ref>
Servo
Mozilla Research team is currently working on an experimental project to develop a new Web browser engine "Servo", that is capable of supporting a variety of current and next generation of hardware like mobile devices, multi-core processors and high-performance GPUs. Servo builds on top of Rust to provide a secure and reliable foundation. It is currently developed on 64 bit devices.<ref> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/research/projects/ </ref>
The main objectives of this experimentation project is improving the layout to graphics rendering - to optimize for power efficiency and maximize parallelism. <ref> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/research/projects/ </ref>
Developer Environment Setup <ref>https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/master/README.md</ref>
Installing Required Packages for Servo
On OS X (homebrew):
brew install automake pkg-config python glfw3 cmake pip install virtualenv
On OS X (MacPorts):
sudo port install python27 py27-virtualenv cmake
On Debian-based Linuxes:
sudo apt-get install curl freeglut3-dev \ libfreetype6-dev libgl1-mesa-dri libglib2.0-dev xorg-dev \ msttcorefonts gperf g++ cmake python-virtualenv \ libssl-dev libglfw-dev
On Fedora:
sudo yum install curl freeglut-devel libtool gcc-c++ libXi-devel \ freetype-devel mesa-libGL-devel glib2-devel libX11-devel libXrandr-devel gperf \ fontconfig-devel cabextract ttmkfdir python python-virtualenv expat-devel \ rpm-build openssl-devel glfw-devel cmake pushd . cd /tmp wget http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/msttcorefonts-2.5-1.spec rpmbuild -bb msttcorefonts-2.5-1.spec sudo yum install $HOME/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.5-1.noarch.rpm popd
On Arch Linux:
sudo pacman -S base-devel git python2 python2-virtualenv mesa glfw ttf-font cmake
Building Servo
Clone the Servo repository hosted at https://github.com/servo/servo and switch to the servo directory.
git clone https://github.com/servo/servo cd servo
Normal Build
./mach build
Building for Android target
ANDROID_TOOLCHAIN=/path/to/toolchain ANDROID_NDK=/path/to/ndk PATH=$PATH:/path/to/toolchain/bin ./mach build --android cd ports/android ANDROID_SDK=/path/to/sdk make install
Note: Building the servo browser engine will take a considerable amount of time.
Launch Servo
Once the build is successful, launch Servo using this command.
./mach run tests/html/about-mozilla.html
Project Description
Implementation
In order to create the Storage inteface and its stub implementation, we made the following changes:
- Created a new file called Storage.webidl under the folder components/script/dom/webidls.
- Added the method definitions in the above interface file.
- Created another file called storage.rs under the specified folder components/script/dom.
- Added constructor for Storage object and stub implementations of the methods defined in the above mentioned interface file.
- Added our module entry in the file components/script/lib.rs so that our files are compiled as part of the Servo build.
- Built the Servo once again and verified that the Servo browser was launching correctly.
Future Work <ref> https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Storage-student-project </ref>
- Create the WindowSessionStorage interface making it return a Storage instance.
- Create a Storage task which will be used to contain all stored data.
- Define a message-passing interface for reading and writing stored data for a particular browser tab.
- Use the Storage task in the implementation of Storage.
- When the value of a stored data is changed, notify its respective browser tab.
- Pass as many tests as possible.
- Implement the WindowLocalStorage interface which behaves slightly different from the WindowSessionStorage interface.
Further Readings
Design and Architecture of Servo: http://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Design/
Learning Rust by Examples: http://rustbyexample.com/
Javascript as Servo's Garbage Collector: http://blog.mozilla.org/research/2014/08/26/javascript-servos-only-garbage-collector/
References
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