An Introduction to HTML 5 Web Workers

http://cggallant.blogspot.com/2010/08/introduction-to-html-5-web-workers.html

by Mamady • 14 years ago

67 6 14 years ago

cggallant.blogspot.com

I hope there are simple ways to disable these on browsers.

Can't imagine every tab having a load of workers in the background, ending well.

One of the pleasant things about javascript is that there are no threads. It's a shame some people have pushed for this API.

After all, it's not rocket science for a competent developer to split a long running task into chunks which are periodically run via a timeout, keeping the UI responsive.

philo23• 14 years ago

While I agree most things could be split into chunks with a timeout, there's definitely a place for web workers, for example in canvas image processing.

crymer11• 14 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree. I had some code that had to parse several different .ply files and creat the respective 3D models, and without web workers, the process was unbearably long.

franze2• 14 years ago

i'm currently a little pissed at webwokers (yeah, i take it personally) that i can't hand them a canvaspixelarray. so basically to use workers for canvasimagemanipulation you have to copy the canvaspixelarray into an uint8array, pass it to the work, get back a uint8array and copy that one back into the imagedata.data canvaspixelarray. oh yeah, the copy actions are of course all in the main thread - so this basically defeats the reason to have webworkers in the first place.

timb• 14 years ago

the newest chrome has support for transferable objects that can be sent directly to a worker without being copied. this works with ArrayBuffer now, not sure if ImageData is transferable yet, but it should be eventually.

demo: http://html5-demos.appspot.com/static/workers/transferables/...

franze2• 14 years ago

nope, the canvaspixelarray is no arraybuffer, doesn't work yet. i check for changes in that regard with every google chrome canary release.

An Introduction to HTML 5 Web Workers

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