[whatwg] workers

[Aaron Boodman]

Ping? Thoughts? Anyone?

Jonas, I know you are the one most likely to be affected by this in
the near term. Thoughts?

I know you are generally in favor of something close to the current
Gears API, and generally against the concept of MessagePorts.

But I think introducing a MessagePort object is important for two main reasons:

- Makes the interface very similar for dedicated and shared workers,
which I think makes it easier to use both.
- Makes it easy for developers to set up multiple 'conversations'
(ports) between clients and workers by calling connect(). The lack of
this is a key annoyance with current Gears workers

Note that I have suggested punting on passing ports around initially,
which I feel like is the harder part.

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 4:52 PM, Chris Prince <cprince at google.com> wrote:
> I think your proposal nearly works for window.postMessage() too.  If
> you move 'onconnect' and 'connect()' into a MessageReceiver interface
> [better name TBD], and make Worker and Window both inherit from
> MessageReceiver, do you end up with a unified messaging model?

Maybe. One wrinkle is that Window's postMessage is a little different,
because you have to pass the origin you're targeting
(http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/comms.html#posting).

I do think that the 'conversation' concept that MessagePorts represent
is also useful for cross-window communication and it would nice to
generalize these as much as possible.

- a