Please don't snip the context. If I say something in the context of
what someone else was stating, the context is important for discussion.
On Aug 18, 2009, at 2:39 PM, Olli Pettay wrote:
On 8/18/09 11:08 PM, Nikunj R. Mehta wrote:
Do we need asynchronous APIs if files are local and file system
access
is fast?
Files that you select from file system aren't necessarily local and
the system access can be very slow in some cases.
I use sshfs all the time to mount remote systems to local file system.
NFS is pretty common everywhere.
I am not pretending that I don't understand networked filesystems.
However, Arun, in his original message, was alluding to your "pretty
common" case as a "desirable edge" case. I suppose you are not in
agreement with his classification then.
If we do, then why do we not also need progress events? I don't
quite follow your reasoning and classification of "desirable edge
case".
It seems that the whole WebApps WG has accepted the "desirable edge
case" of dealing with system delays such as in SQL databases and file
systems through the use of asynchronous APIs.
There are cases like (the example is about XHR)
http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2009/06/reading-ogg-files-with-javascript.html
where one wants to load a huge file and process it while still loading
the file.
Not sure how I should interpret your answer in the context of my
question. As I understand it, you want to see blocks of data read from
the file so that you can incrementally process the data received. This
is pretty much the same programming model one would have on the
server, where events are rarely used to access file blocks. That is
what I am getting at with my next sentence.
Honestly, I don't like to use events for file access.
Why not? To me the difference between callbacks and events isn't that
big, but with events supporting progress events becomes possible.
(I wouldn't want to see different progress tracking for XHR and File
reading).
Progress tracking is not the same as incremental processing although
you could employ the former to do the latter. However, that forces
everyone to think of the arrival of data as an event, and that is
likely to be unacceptable to some.
Nikunj
http://o-micron.blogspot.com
