[whatwg] Workers

[Aaron Boodman]

Wheeee!

How about:

- synchronous network access
- storage access in general
- synchronous db access
- access to a subset of the capabilities from the window.location
object, for example the "href" property and the "reload" method. We
have found that some workers want to reload themselves when they find
they can no longer communicate with their origin server
- access to read and write cookies. We have found that some workers
want to be able to modify the cookies for their origins
- access to some sort of printline/console debugging facility


I still think you should be able to pass JSON-style objects between
workers without needing to do the serialization yourself. This allows
the implementation to pick a fast way to do the copy without having to
go to a string. More importantly, it makes more sense if we're going
to allow passing end points between workers too. Without this, you'd
have to first pass a message to a worker as a string, then pass the
end point. It makes more sense for callers to be able to build up an
object parameter that includes strings, booleans, numbers, arrays,
objects, and end points, along with any other datatypes we dream up
that make sense to be passable. The API is more future-proof this way.

Another idea (and something that is present in Gears) is the ability
to load workers from another origin. This provides a way to do
controlled cross-origin communication that is more lightweight than
loading an iframe and doing postMessage() with it.

- a

On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 6:30 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>
> Based on popular demand (and threats that without a spec implementations
> would proceed regardless) I have started collecting use cases and
> requirements for a specification for background worker scripts ("threads")
> in JavaScript:
>
>   http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-workers/current-work/#requirements
>
> Any feedback would be greately appreciated, especially from authors
> involved in large Web applications who would make significant use of such
> a feature, and from implementors of browsers that may support this.
>
> --
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
>