OSCON 2014

I attended OSCON 2014 held in Portland, Oregon. I think Portland is the Mecca of Open Source because OSCON is held there every year and Intel Open Source Technology center is also in Hillsboro near Portland. In addition, Linus Torvalds is based in Portland.

I wanted to attend some sessions this year, but I didn't see many topics related to my job. There are more high-level topics above system level. Anyway, it's great to hear voices from web developers as a web engine developer.

OSCON is a bit different from other F/OSS conferences, which is aimed at the Web development, clouds, database, language, and hardware like Raspberry Pi and Arduino. So, there are no Linux kernel, GNOME/KDE, and other system-level topics. I think that Guadec or FOSDEM is well suited for me.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the atmosphere of the F/OSS conference. I saw many hackers and geeks who were hacking around session rooms. There were many BoFs until 10PM.

Many companies that have open source solutions joined the Expo. They showed their solutions and services to visitors. Intel also showed a Crosswalk demo video with a web application running on Crosswalk controlling a drone remotely, which shows Crosswalk can talk to the device using JavaScript to communicate with each other over wireless networks. It was cool.

I had an opportunity to use Firefox OS. The device looks cheap, but the UI responsiveness is really good. I heard that it's just 150$, but it was released in some developing countries. I hope to see a Firefox OS phone in the major markets. I got lots of information from the Firefox OS session. The speakers introduced ways on how to develop Firefox OS applications and to use the development tools. It's quite interesting to know that Firefox OS applications can run in Firefox for Android.

I need to learn other areas to enjoy talks more in OSCON next year. :-)

Ozone-Wayland

Ozone-Wayland is an Ozone implementation of Chromium, which allows to run Crosswalk and Chromium browser natively on Wayland without any X11 dependence[1].

I have been working on Ozone-Wayland recently. There were two releases since I was involved in the development. In the latest release, I contributed the virtual keyboard support to Ozone-Wayland. You can find how it works in the following video:

The ozone-wayland team has been focusing on graphics accelerations such as WebGL, Canvas 2D, Accelerated Compositing on Wayland. WebGL and Canvas 2D accelerations can be accelerated by off-screen Rendering in GPU process. In the latest release, we started supporting multi-touch and virtual keyboard, which work fine on Tizen IVI as you can the above video.

What is Ozone?
 Ozone is an abstraction layer used by Chromium browsers to separate out the different windowing systems and also abstract surface acceleration for Aura UI framework, input handling, event handling, and other UI-related matters[4]. Ozone-Wayland provides Wayland support for Ozone[2].

Reference

1. Project Homepage: https://github.com/01org/ozone-wayland
2. https://01.org/ozone-wayland/blogs/kalyankondapally/2014/beta-channel-updated-m35
3. Ozone-Wayland Release Adds Virtual Keyboard, Touch Support, Mar. 26,  2014 
4. Chromium On Wayland "Ozone" Continues, Oct. 07, 2013
5. Wayland-Based Chromium Browser Released, Nov. 11, 2013
6. Chromium Ported To Wayland, Now Working, Sep. 18, 2013