[OpenLayers-Dev] javascript workers

[Tim Schaub]

rldhont wrote:
> Christopher Schmidt a écrit :
>> On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 10:13:40AM +0200, Esteban olm wrote:
>>   
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> Is in the openlayers developers' mind the idea of use javscript workers in
>>> browsers that will support them to improve performance?
>>>
>>> I think, for example, to have two "sub-layers" for each layer, so the
>>> workers draws the new data on the hidden sublayer, then when finished, it
>>> calls the main thread and it hides the actual sublayer and shows the hidden
>>> one, or something like that.
>>>
>>> For the user, there is no IU lost of performance, and he see the layer
>>> re-drawn only when it has been finished.
>>> Or something like that :)
>>>     
>> As far as I know, no browser (apart from Chrome?) natively supports
>> Javascript workers. The idea of maintaining something that is in such a
>> small percentage of browsers in the core of OpenLayers worries me, but
>> would be happy to suppot it as an addin, maintained by the community.
>>
>> Regards,
>>   
> 
> Firefox 3.5, which is in a public Realese Candidate Version, natively 
> supports JavaScript Workers. And it's probably the same implementation 
> in google gears like for Geolocation API.
> 
> JavaScript Workers will be usefull for reprojection, writing format, 
> intersection and other geo-treatment, but it's not possible to use DOM 
> in Worker.
> 

Yeah, I was going to say the same.  Workers could be used to handle long 
running geoprocessing jobs - but won't help avoid rendering bottlenecks.

Tim


> Regards,
> 
> René-Luc D'Hont
> 3Liz
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-- 
Tim Schaub
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Expert service straight from the developers.