NCTU Servo Android Browser MVP

Building a front-end prototype for servo on Android.

Meta issue page on GitHub: https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/15776

Members

Students

• Jasmine Chen
• J wang

Mentors

• Shing Lyu
• Kan-Ru Chen

Coordinator

• Irvin Chen

The process

1. Find/file a bug to https://github.com/servo/servo
2. Fork servo/servo
3. Start hacking
4. Submit a pull request
5. A bot will find you an reviewer
   • If the reviewer is not responding, ask on IRC or ping me (Shing)
6. Reviewer will ask you to modify your code (if necessary)
   • modify it, commit to your branch, push to your fork directly
   • The change will show up in the pull request
   • The reviewer will check again
7. Reviewer will give you an “r+” means it’s ready to go
   • You might need to do a rebase
8. Reviewer will tell the bot to do testing for you and merge the code if all passed
   • If any failed, fix it

The goal

• Android browser MVP https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/15776
• Task breakdown
• Keep a blog/note for your learning
  • This will help if you failed to deliver a working product (which might actually happen!)

How to get help

• IRC
  • jdm (Toronto time) is in charge for the students
  • Shing (Taipei time) is time-zone friendly and can speak in Chinese
  • Fabrice (Mountain View) is the Android expert
• Ask in the bug/pull request directly
• Wiki has some good documentation https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki
• There are many comment in the code
• API references: https://doc.servo.org/servo/index.html

Notes

Documenting significant events :)

---

Mar. 22, 2017

Things we did:

• ./mach run <url> ==> https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/master/python/servo/post_build_commands.py#L67

Issues encountered & Lessons learned:

• The run command depends on adb (Android Debug Bridge) and am (Activity Manager)

TODOs:

• Find out what took place during

am force-stop com.mozilla.servo
echo servo >/sdcard/servo/android_params
"echo '%s' >>/sdcard/servo/android_params" % param.replace("'", "\\'")
am start com.mozilla.servo/com.mozilla.servo.MainActivity

---

Mar. 7, 2017

Things we did:

• Setep a Kubuntu 16.04 VM on VMWare Workstation, Windows 10
• Built servo for Android successfully on Kubuntu 16.04
• Built and tested the .apk
• Wrote some instructions & notes in regard to the building process: https://lnishan.github.io/2017/building-servo-for-android/

Issues encountered & Lessons learned:

• .apk should be packaged using OpenJDK 8
• Currently, the Servo app crashes or blanks out on most webpages. Can browse to the frontpage of Mozilla but the stylesheets and images seem to be completely ignored

TODOs:

• Document and report minor issues related to building for Android

---

Mar. 6, 2017

Things we did:

• Setup a VM on VirtualBox, macOS Sierra
• Built servo for Android successfully on Kubuntu 16.10

Issues encountered & Lessons learned:

• Memory usage peaked at ~2.5G, so a minimum of 3G RAM is required for a successful build (encountered ICEs with rustc)
• (Unresolved) Ubuntu 16.10 only provides OpenJDK 8 whereas packaging (ie. ./mach package) depends on OpenJDK 7 -> It actually depends on OpenJDK 8 but for some reasons some .jar files were compiled with OpenJDK 7 and thus the imcompatibility.
• Ubuntu 16.04

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:openjdk-r/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk
sudo update-alternatives --config java

TODOs:

• Document and report minor issues
• Test the build

---

Feb. 28, 2017

Things we did:

• Attempt to build servo for Android
• Reported issue: Issues while Building servo for Android (on macOS Sierra) #15758

Issues encountered & Lessons learned:

• macOS not officially supported for Android builds
• NDK r12 or r12b is a must. Manual install is required

TODOs:

• None

---