Renesis V3 – More Details and Status Update

Well, it might the be time to talk more details on Renesis V3. We are currently working on getting an alpha out within our labs by december 2008 however no promises yet but we’ll do better :-). Renesis V3 is a complete rewrite as stated already and is focused on supporting SVG 1.2 Mobile then going “back” to SVG 1.1 full. Now where are we at this point?

We have successfully finished the Core which does all that “usable stuff” like we’ve implemented our own Unicode handling utilities. Sure enough we could for example use ICU but it’s just too big and this time we’ve decided to avoid any 3rd-party libraries completely but instead write everything on our own except on the script engine front (but more to come on that in the next chapter). We’ve also finished that whole XML stuff which includes parsing, serializing, building trees and such things. Now our focus is currently on the platform stuff which close to be finished (70%) and then we’ll go on with the rendering engine which by itself will be completely based on OpenVG. We will also build our own OpenVG implementation based on the rendering engine of the Renesis V2 as it has proven to be very fast and not every computer has the hardware required for using OpenVG efficiently saying that our software renderer does much better on most systems according to perfomance and especially quality.

On parallel to the Platform Stuff, another team is currently working on our Model-Layer. Before V3 we’ve always implemented each DOM Class (and there’re very many, there’s uDOM, DOM3 Core/Events/Views, CSS DOM and much more) by hand which has proven to be very inefficient. Inefficient in the way of not having the full control when something changes, difficulties in implementing wrappers and heavy depencies resulting in slow perfomance and much overhead. This time we are building an abstraction layer which can automatically (re-)generate our whole object model from given IDLs yet keeping existing code untouched. In the same process, our model generator is also capable of generating any kind of wrappers on the fly saving hundred of hours of work. At this point we are figuring to implement Google’s V8 Engine and COM (JScript) from Microsoft. To be able to use Google’s V8 Engine we do also need to extend it heavily to support COM Objects as otherwise we couldn’t communicate with the Internet Explorer when running as a plugin.