Timelapse is an experimental fork of the WebKit project that implements interactive record/replay for web applications. At a high level, Timelapse adds 1) a deterministic record/replay infrastructure and 2) a new developer tool (inside Web Inspector) for creating, browsing, and navigating through captured recordings. For more details, visit the wiki page Changes from Vanilla WebKit.
Timelapse is part of ongoing research in the Computer Science and Engineering department of the University of Washington. The project FAQ page answers some common questions about supported browsers, platforms, and future work.
Binary and source builds are only tested on Mac OS X 10.7+ and won't work on other WebKit ports yet (QT, GTK, EFL, Win, etc). (Want to fix that? see Future Project Ideas).
A Timelapse-enabled WebKit binary build is created irregularly, based on recent Timelapse development and upstream changes to WebKit. You can find a link to the latest binary on the project wiki.
Timelapse has the following build requirements (on OS X):
- 4 GB of RAM
- XCode 4.6+
- git 1.7+
If you are familiar with git and GitHub, you can run the following commands and wait a while (the repository is several gigabytes in size).
mkdir -p ~/repos/timelapse/ && cd ~/repos/timelapse/
git init
git remote add upstream git://git.webkit.org/WebKit.git
git remote add github https://github.com/burg/timelapse.git
git fetch upstream master:upstream
git fetch github timelapse:timelapse
git checkout timelapse
Otherwise, see Note getting started developing Timelapse for more detailed instructions.
For binary builds, Timelapse will be available when you launch Safari by clicking on the nightly .app.
For source builds, Timelapse integrates with the WebKit build system, and is enabled by specifying the --web-replay feature flag.
Debug builds are started like so:
Tools/Scripts/build-webkit --debug --web-replay
And release builds are started like so:
Tools/Scripts/build-webkit --web-replay
When everything has built, you can launch a Release version of Timelapse using:
Tools/Scripts/run-safari
Timelapse is open source research, and we encourage code reuse and
contributions by others. If you have code or ideas for new features,
send a pull request against the timelapse branch.
More details on contributing to Timelapse are available on the Wiki
page Note
using git and GitHub.
For details on the research roadmap, look on the wiki.