Hi Guys, I need to run an expensive computation in the background ( 2 seconds on a modern day laptop ) while keeping the UI responsive. For this matter I have tried creating a secondary application and communicate with it in a non-blocking way. I share my thoughts so far to see if anyone can help with this one.
First, some approaches to create a secondary application: * Load a module at runtime * Publish a module from within a new Frame ( Gonzalez/Harui trick ) * Open another SWF altogether ( seems the safest best bet to me ) Some approaches to communicate between apps: * LocalConnection ( sync ) * Write/Poll a LSO ( async ) And to go from blocking to non-blocking communication ( maybe ) * Upon receiving a call start a timer and listen for the completion event. This should make the call return while leaving it up to events to start the real processing. Now, I haven't tried every combination yet, but so far I found some interesting results: I created two separate applications that talk through a LocalConnection. They use the timer trick ( upon receiving a call they set up a very short internal timer that will eventually start internal execution of the code ). If I open both SWFs in IE they effectively work as expected. I can start a very heavy computation on the secondary app while the first remains totally responsive to user events. Then I can make a reverse call and pass the results back. So far so good :) Firefox, however, is a show killer. No matter how I open the two apps ( tabs, apps, etc ) blocking occurs. Can someone from the flash player shed some light on this? This is not real multi-threading, it is simpler in the sense that I don't need synchronization. The contract is passing an input and waiting for a result. Now, even if I managed to pull this off with parallel applications... how would I materialize that setup in AIR? Thanks, Aldo -- :::: Aldo Bucchi :::: +1 858 539 6986 +56 9 8429 8300 +56 9 7623 8653 skype:aldo.bucchi
