Here are some tips to ease your introduction to Epiphany development. # Building the Code Epiphany often requires an unstable development release of WebKit to build successfully. If you're not sure how to handle this, refer to the [development wiki page](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web/Development) for suggestions. # Code Style In order to keep the code nice and clean we have a few requirements you'll need to stick to in order to get your patch accepted: * Use 2-space no-tabs for indentation. * Use K&R style for the braces. * No braces for one line control clauses. * Callback functions have a suffix _cb. * All files have to be encoded in UTF-8. * Use `char`/`int`/`double`/…, not `gchar`/`gint`/`gdouble`/… types. * All implementation files must include first `"config.h"`, followed by the primary header, followed by a blank line, followed by all the local headers sorted alphabetically, followed by a blank line, followed by all the system headers sorted alphabetically. Headers should follow the same pattern excluding the config.h and self file section, for obvious reasons. * Make comments full sentences. This means proper capitalization and punctuation. * `data/kr-gnome-indent.cfg` is provided as a reference config file for the uncrustify program to get correct indentation in new files. * There's no space between a type cast and the variable name: Right: `(int *)foo`. Wrong: `(int*) foo`. # Code Structure ## Layering The code is currently structured into layers, where higher-level layers have full access to lower-level layers, but lower-level layers have no access to the higher layers except via delegate objects. (See `EphyEmbedContainer` for an example of a delegate interface that allows `embed/` limited access to `EphyWindow`, even though `EphyWindow` is in `src/`.) The levels are: * `src/`, the highest layer, mostly GUI stuff * `lib/widgets/`. FIXME: very confusing, this layering should be fixed * `embed/`, stuff relating to the web view * `lib/` lowest layer, helper classes that don't need higher-level stuff The build system enforces that higher-level layers are not in the include path of lower-level layers, so you should not be able to break the layering unless you go out of your way to do so. ## GtkApplication and EphyShell Epiphany has one singleton `EphyShell` object. Its inheritance hierarchy is: ``` - GApplication --- GtkApplication ----- EphyEmbedShell ------- EphyShell ``` There is exactly one instance of `EphyShell`, and it is also both the `EphyEmbedShell` and the `GtkApplication`. Use normal GObject casts to get a pointer to the type you need. `EphyShell` is a singleton object where we put all our global state, so it's kind of like having a global variable, but more organized. You can access it from anywhere in `src/` using `ephy_shell_get_default()`. `EphyEmbedShell` is a separate class from `EphyShell` for layering purposes. It is accessible anywhere from `embed/` or `src/`. So if you have global stuff that you need to access from `embed/`, you need to put it in `EphyEmbedShell`, not `EphyShell`. ## Important Epiphany Objects `EphyWindow` is a subclass of `GtkApplicationWindow`, which is a subclass of `GtkWindow`. It's the window. You can have any number of windows open at a time. `EphyWindow` contains (a) an `EphyHeaderBar` (subclass of `GtkHeaderBar`), and (b) an `EphyNotebook` (subclass of `GtkNotebook`). `EphyNotebook` contains one or more tabs, and each tab is an `EphyEmbed`. That's worth repeating: an `EphyEmbed` corresponds to one browser tab. Each `EphyEmbed` contains an `EphyWebView` (subclass of `WebKitWebView`). This is the object that actually displays the web page, where all the web browser magic happens. ## Important WebKitGTK+ Objects WebKitGTK+ is a WebKit port that provides a GTK+ API wrapper around WebKit. WebKit is really nice. It encapsulates 95% of the complexity of building a web browser, like the JavaScript engine, HTML layout engine, and actually rendering the webpage. Epiphany only has to deal with the remaining 5%. The most important WebKitGTK+ objects are: * `WebKitWebView` (superclass of `EphyWebView`). Displays the web. * `WebKitWebContext`, a global object that manages shared state among web views. Epiphany has one `EphyWebView` per browser tab. It has exactly one `WebKitWebContext`, stored by `EphyEmbedShell`. WARNING: you need to be careful to use the web context from `EphyEmbedShell` when using a WebKit API that expects a `WebKitWebContext`. Do not use WebKit's default `WebKitWebContext`; that is, do not pass `NULL` to any `WebKitWebContext *` parameter, and do not use `webkit_web_context_get_default()`. There is separate documentation for the [main WebKitGTK+ API](https://webkitgtk.org/reference/webkit2gtk/unstable/index.html), for the [WebKitGTK+ DOM API](https://webkitgtk.org/reference/webkitdomgtk/unstable/index.html), and for the [WebKitGTK+ JavaScriptCore API](https://webkitgtk.org/reference/jsc-glib/unstable/index.html). ## Modern WebKit Process Architecture Modern WebKit (formerly WebKit2) has a multiprocess architecture to improve the robustness of the browser. The UI process (the main epiphany process) runs several subprocesses: * Any number of WebKitWebProcesses, which handle rendering web content * One WebKitNetworkProcess, which handles most network requests * One or zero WebKitDatabaseProcesses, which handles IndexedDB In WebKitGTK+, by default each WebKitWebView shares the same WebKitWebProcess. This can reduce overall resource usage, but it results in a less-stable browser as a crash in one tab will crash all other tabs, and the effects of memory leaks are greatly amplified. So Epiphany runs a separate WebKitWebProcess for each browser tab. (This is almost true. Sometimes a tab will create another tab using JavaScript. In such cases, the web views are "related" and share the same WebKitWebProcess.) There is a GSettings option to switch back to single-process mode if required, but we do not claim to support this! Epiphany uses GtkApplication to ensure uniqueness, so you usually only have one UI process running at a time. An exception is if you use incognito mode, or private profile mode (which is only available from the command line). In such cases, there is no shared state with the main Epiphany browser process. ## Epiphany Web Extension For some Epiphany features, we need to run code in the web process. This code is called the "web extension" and lives in `embed/web-extension/`. It is compiled into a shared library `libephywebextension.so` and installed in `$(pkglibdir)` (e.g. `/usr/lib64/epiphany`). `EphyEmbedShell` tells WebKit to look for web extensions in that location using `webkit_web_context_set_web_extensions_directory()`, starts a private D-Bus server (a D-Bus server that is completely separate from the shared system and session busses), and advertises the address of its D-Bus server to the web extension by passing it in a `GVariant` parameter to `webkit_web_context_set_web_extensions_initialization_user_data()`. Now the Epiphany UI process and web extension can communicate back and forth via D-Bus. `EphyWebExtensionProxy` encapsulates this IPC in the UI process; `EphyEmbedShell` uses it to communicate with the web process. Epiphany uses script message handlers as an additional form of IPC besides D-Bus. This allows the web extension to send a `WebKitJavascriptResult` directly to the UI process, which is received in `EphyEmbedShell`. This should generally be used rather than D-Bus when you need to send a message from the web process to the UI process. # Debugging To enable debugging use the configure option `-Ddeveloper_mode=true`. ## Logging At execution time, you must enable the log service. To enable the log service, set the environment variable `EPHY_LOG_MODULES`, which has the form: `[:]*`, where `moduleName` is a filename. E.g. `export EPHY_LOG_MODULES=ephy-window.c:ephy-autocompletion.c`. The special log module `all` enables all log modules. Use the `LOG()` macro to put debug messages in the code. ## Warnings At execution time, you must enable the service. To enable you to debug warnings, set the environment variable `EPHY_DEBUG_BREAK`. Possible value for `EPHY_DEBUG_BREAK` variable: ``` stack Prints a stack trace. suspend Use this to stop execution when a warning occurs. You can then attach a debugger to the process. trap Use this while running epiphany in a debugger. This makes execution stop and gives back control to the debugger. ``` ## Profiling At execution time, you must enable the profiling service. To enable the profiling service, set the environment variable `EPHY_PROFILING_MODULES`, which has the form `[:]*`, where `moduleName` is a filename. E.g. `export EPHY_PROFILE_MODULES=ephy-window.c:ephy-autocompletion.c`. The special profiling module `all` enables all profiling modules. Use `START_PROFILER STOP_PROFILER` macros to profile pieces of code.