Past two months

For the past two and a half months, I worked as an intern in the Intel Shanghai Opensource Technology Center (OTC), the Tizen Web QA team. Yep, that Tizen. This post aims to conclude my 2.5 months work.

Code Coverage

My first task is to generate a code coverage report for our test cases (mainly web API tests) of both webkit and web runtime. Code coverage is a kind of statistical method to calculate how many lines/blocks/functions are executed/called by programs during their runtime. The main tools I used are gcov and lcov, gcov is the primary tool to generate and collect coverage report and lcov finishes the visualization work (HTML report).

The main work I did is building the webkit and web runtime projects for Tizen platform and making the binary has the ability to produce code coverage on runtime. I am not going talk any technical details, because it won’t be a difficult job if you read the related manuals carefully. Simply changing the compile flag is the key part.

GruntJS

Another task for is to build a code styling tool for our internal projects. My leader asked me to investigate and learn GruntJS, which is powerful task runner written in Node.js. Actually, after a simple investigation, I found that GruntJS is already a popular tool among open source projects. Hundreds of plugins make grunt even stronger.

Our projects contains different kinds of source code files, mainly are js/json/css/html/xml. So I picked three plugins from the official plugins list. They are jsbeautifier, cssbeautifier and prettify. After read the README of the three plugins and manual of grunt, the tool works pretty well based on a easy configuration. Of course, grunt can do way more than just formatting and lintting: Unit test, automation build and so on. According to my experience, grunt should be a MUST to a project. I will write some more details in other posts.

Web Frameworks

Also, I learned pretty much principles of web frameworks, mainly two parts: webkit and web runtimes. I figured out what is a renderer engine, what happened in the low level when the browser try to load a web page, what is a web runtime and its main structure and many interesting stuffs and technologies.

Summary

I think I had a splendid summer and got so many hands-on experience of many cutting-edge techs. Also, I luckily won an iPad 4 in the Test The Web Forward (TTWF) Shanghai for writing many cases to test FileAPI which is an important spec in HTML5. A rewarding summer, Huh? :)