Network Loading Refactoring

• Intro
  • I (Alex) have been doing a lot of work in it recently - "Its horrible."
  • I think we made a mistake using ResourceHandle in WebKit2
  • NSURLConnection (Mac) is deprecated
  • NSURLSession is the replacement, converting to it now
    • fits much better

• Sessions on other ports?
  • GTK / EFL - Not sure.
  • Another port (Naver Windows) uses the chromium networking stack.
  • webkit-dev thread about how to get this working with libsoup => talk to Carlos Garcia

• WebKit2, ResourceLoader proxies to the NetworkProcess
  • easy cleanup if we eliminate non-NetworkProcess path
  • some loads in WebProcess (ApplicationCache)

Issues

• Confusion
  • few people understand how the loaders work (FrameLoader, MainFrameLoader, DocLoader)
• Careful when moving to Sessions
  • NSURLConnection hooks may be exposed to WebKit1 Mac APIs, fragile
• Before refactoring, someone has to understand everything
  • fix one loader bug and introduce others
• Update the loader diagram ​http://www.webkit.org/blog-files/loader-diagram.svg
  • lots of changes (DocLoader => CachedResourceLoaders)
  • main resource is cached now
  • ThreadableDocumentLoader => XHR / fetch / workers / background loading
  • other loaders (PingLoader)

Goals

• sandbox the web process from making any network requests
• make NetworkProcess mandatory WebKit2
• Memory Cache (Antii)
  • want to move work off of the Main Thread in WebProcess (when communicating with NetworkProcess)
  • want to improve cooperation between WebProcess and NetworkProcess caches (MemoryCache and NetworkCache)