I have reviewed the draft specification dated 1/14 [1]. I am not sure
about the status of this spec vis-a-vis this WG. Still, and without
having reviewed any mailing list archives about prior discussion on
this draft, here are some questions around the scope of this spec:
1. Are background workers executing outside the current browsing
context completely out of consideration? As an implementor of sync
engines and developer of applications that use them, Oracle's
experience shows that trickle sync is the most usable approach and
that in trickle sync an application doesn't need to be active for data
to be moved back and forth.
2. Long running scripts pose a problem especially when script
containers leak memory over time. Is it giving too much freedom to
workers to run as long as they wish and use as many network/memory
resources as they wish?
3. On devices which do not like background processes making continuous
use of CPU/network resources (such as iPhone and BlackBerry). how can
one take advantage of native notification services to provide up-to-
date information at a low enough resource cost?
4. Why is the spec biased towards those implementors who would like to
persist synchronization results and application data in the structured/
local storage only? Why not consider needs of those who would prefer
to keep their data accessible directly through HTTP/S, even in the
disconnected case?
I hope to hear the opinion of those on this ML that are interested in
WebWorkers. I look forward also to discussing this spec in the WebApps
WG, when it officially gets added to its charter.
Cheers,
Nikunj
[1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-workers/current-work/ retrieved on
Jan 16, 09
- [Web Workers API] Data synchronization Nikunj Mehta
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