Today I want to report something about the Synergy OS development state. Synergy OS was introduced in december 2009. So this project is alive since less than 2 months now. The first evaluation process regarding which existing software components are best suitable to use in Synergy OS is finished now.
In Synergy OS, the following software components will be integrated:
- V8 Javascript engine from Google
- WebIDL compiler from ES Operating System
- Chromium Browser from Google
- Partly code from ES Operating System for C++ / V8 bridging
- Jetty Webserver
- Lively Kernel from Sun Microsystems
- ExtJS Open Source
- OpenJDK
And some more smaller components introduced here later.
Open project management tasks for the next week
Synergy OS has a component architecture and it’s software components will be developed independently on code.google.com. This prevents hard dependencies between the different projects and enables developers, software architects and maintainers to use the projects more freely for any purpose. For example the foundation classes could be used exclusively or the ESShell could be integrated independently in some other linux distributions too.
For each project currently scoped in the concepts category, project pages need to be set up and configured accoring to the needs for collaborative development.
Further it’s needed to improve the community communication structure. An IRC channel needs to be registered on irc.freenode.net. I scope #synergyos to be registered to use for this purpose.
Open development tasks
- We need some more concepts scoping the ideas of Synergy OS in the Concepts section here. Specially charts and graphics to visualize the architecture. Some of the graphics are already done but need to be uploaded here.
- The SynergyShell needs to be implemented for Milestone 1 and to be committed into the project repository. In this version the SynergyShell just wraps the V8 virtual machine and executes the javascript instructions. It also has a native binding to the OpenJDK driven Synergy OS Framework.
- Chromium needs to be commited into the “SynergyView” (Milestone 1) project and customized to access localhost by default at startup.
- Jetty needs to be commited into the “SynergyProvider” project. An easy bridge between SynergyShell and SynergyProvider will be written to let WebApps be executable by V8.
- The Lively kernel project code needs to be commited into the “SynergyWM” project. It needs to be packed into a WebApp that provides the window manager for the SynergyView. This is the first WebApp that will be called by SynergyView at startup.
- Synergy Web Framework classes need to be implemented and commited into the project repository to be able to use them inside of he WebApp’s
- Same for the Synergy OS Framework classes. They need to be implemented for the WebApp backends to e.g. access files on the filesystem
At the end of the implementation a first technical demo is available here. Screencasts will be created and the concepts of Synergy OS can be prooven.
The timeline for Milestone 1 of all projects is due to 20.02.2010. Until this date the technical demo should be online for download by anyone.
The first technical demo will run on top of Ubuntu Linux 10.04 Lucid Lynx.
Thanks & Regards,
Aron
Photo by: Karsten Franke
