Web Workers

Hi Rob,

I've heard web workers in HTML 5 does something similar to Threads in Java or another programming language. Where or what kind of real world scenarios can benefit from Web Workers?

Thanks!
G Sunderam

Any time when you need to do processing in JavaScript that would last for a noticeable amount of time (ie. greater than 1/10th second) but not require access to the DOM (WebWorkers do not have access to window or document). WebWorkers communicate back to the parent web page through a message passing mechanism so it is easy to swamp any performance gains made through background processing in copying data between the two threads if you have a large dataset, however WebWorkers do have access to Ajax so if you wanted to request a large block of data from a server, do some complex processing and then deliver a relatively small result set to the page that would be an ideal scenario for them. There are some code examples in the spec which you may find helpful.