Blink is cleanly separated from Chromium's content layer. This article gives a quick overview of Blink's interface. Most code references in this article are relative to Blink's root directory, third_party/WebKit.

This article is likely to get updated and grow as my understanding of the Blink codebase improves.

The Web and Platform APIs

The interface is defined by the files in the following directories:

  • public/web/ has headers for the classes implemented by Blink and used by the content layer; these classes are implemented in Source/web
  • public/platform/ has classes implemented by the content layer and used by Blink; these classes are implemented in Chrome's content layer, in the content/ directory in Chrome's source tree

Blink's public interface classes are all defined in the blink namespace, and have the Web prefix in their name. In fact, when reading Blink code, it is safe to assume that any class whose name starts with Web belongs to Blink's public interface.

Wrappers and Pointers

Headers in public/ are not allowed to include files outside of the public/ directory. This implies that all the blink::Web classes and structures can only use internal classes via pointers or references.

Many classes declared in public/web wrap Blink's internal classes. For example, public/web/WebNode.h defines WebNode, which wraps WebCore::Node, defined in Sorce/core/dom/Node.h.

Some classes hold raw pointers to the internal classes that they wrap. For example, WebDatabase (defined in public/web/WebDatabase.h) holds a raw pointer to the WebCore::DatabaseBackendBase instance that it wraps. However, most classes use a smart pointer. For example, WebNode uses the WebPrivatePtr smart pointer class to reference the WebCore::Node instance that it wraps.

WebPrivatePtr, declared and completely defined in public/platform/WebPrivatePtr.h, is the most popular smart pointer class. It is used for wrapping reference-counted classes, and automatically calls ref(), deref(), etc. on the wrapped instance. The header has a very useful block comment right above the WebPrivatePtr class declaration. On a first read, I'd skip the boilerplate at the beginning of the file and go straight for the block comment.

WebPrivateOwnPtr, declared and completely defined in public/platform/WebPrivateOwnPtr.h, is used for wrapping classes that are allocated on the heap, but do not use reference-counting. The smart pointer automatically destructs the wrapped instance. This class' header also has a very useful block comment.

The Platform Object

The entry point to the implementations of the classes and functions defined in the public/platform headers is the blink::Platform class, defined in public/platform/Platform.h and implemented in content/child/blink_platform_impl.h in the Chromium souce tree.

Blink code obtains a reference to the current platform by calling the blink::Platform::current() static function, and then calls a Platform virtual method. Many methods are used to obtain instances of platform classes.

References