[webkit-gtk] WebKit2 GTK+ API

[Benjamin Otte]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 3:23 PM, Carlos Garcia Campos
<cgarcia at igalia.com> wrote:
> This is similar to g_file_copy_async(). In this case the
> ProgressCallback provides the load status and progress as a double
> between 0.0 an 1.0. I've also removed the failed state, when the
> operation finishes (even if it's been cancelled), the GAsyncReady
> callback is called, and if the load failed the finish() method returns
> FALSE and GError contains the details.
>
What confuses me a bit about this operation (in particular when
compared with g_file_copy ()) is that this operation operates on the
webview, while copying is an operation with the file. So it is
perfectly valid to do 5 g_file_copy() operations on the same file at
the same time, while it is never valid to have more than 1 load
happening per webview.

So from my perspective, the current API is perfectly fine. You have
the WebView object, which exports a bunch of state to inspect and the
possibility to modify it using certain APIs. It is in no way as bad as
File or Socket IO where you don't have any state that you can inspect
or even get notified of changes for. In fact, you have to open a
monitor on the parent directory to figure out if a file changes its
name, a GFile doesn't even represent a file, but rather a path on your
filesystem, and therefor might change which file it points to without
you ever noticing. From my point of view, this is bad design, don't
try to copy it.

This whole notion of async API is really ugly, I'd try very hard to
avoid it at all costs. In fact, it's so bad that people do sync IO
everywhere and pray nobody notices. (Try looking at the GTK icon theme
code or the CSS theme loading or basically anything else inside GTK.
Or try looking at lots of DBUS-using code that calls functions with
return values. In particular AT-SPI...)

Benjamin