[webkit-dev] NetworkProcess / NetworkThread in the UIProcess

[Zeno Albisser]

On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 5:01 PM, Balazs Kelemen <kbalazs at webkit.org> wrote:

>
> You also need IPC because the NetworkProcess serves the needs of the web
> process. Could you describe why a network thread in the UI process fit your
> needs bettter? Is it to support API's related to networking or does it have
> other advantages?
>
>
Yes, that was slightly ambiguous. Let me rephrase that.
Currently the IPC for the NetworkProcess is setup by
ChildProcess::initialize(). Since we would not need to create a whole new
process in our case, we would just spin of a thread and create the
appropriate IPC connections ourselves.
That could be an implementation detail of our NetworkThread implementation.
For prototyping i even reused the whole ChildProcess code with a few minor
changes. But it would feel wrong to have instances of ChildProcess in
something that is a thread of the same process.

One of the main advantages of having networking in the UIProcess for our
port is, that we could support some features such as Application URL
Schemes without going through the WebKit2 API.
This is a very Qt specific use case, that IMHO does not fit very nicely
into the rest of the WebKit2 API. It is Qt specific because Qt makes heavy
use of qrc files to embed content. And Application URL Schemes was the
solution to allow for qrc content in a QQuickWebView.

- Zeno
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