0.7 and 0.8 - Dual release, now with moar web workers

For anyone who doesn't know Sundae, is a canvas reference tester library built in Javascript. My goal is get Processing.js, c3dl, and XB-pointstream to use this tool.


What's new?

Blurring is. Blurring is the basically smudging the image, the reason any tester needs this is because colours will render differently on different browsers. So if you took a reference screen shot and compare it to a real time render often times during an exact pixel comparison there will be slight variations. So in order to remove these useless errors I added two things. I stole all of my blurring logic from the Kraken javascript benchmarker here. Then I happily thrifted through the code that birthed Sundae, the Pjs ref tester and took their comparison logic.

So in short what's new is that a majority of the heavy lifting and work in the libraries engine is done. Now that compare and blurring are working I can take a sigh of relief.


The Unsung Hero's

Finally this project has web workers, why are they good? because it's the equivalent of putting something on the back burning and forgetting about it until you remember and its perfectly cooked the next time you look at it. Having the ability to throw the work into a background process is great. The best part is you don't lose control of your browser.

 Using web workers is pretty simple to boot, I setup a worker pool in my main thread and each worker roughly looks like this.

 var worker = new Worker("blah.js");
worker.onmessage = function (event) {
...
};
worker.postMessage("meaningful data"); 

Meanwhile in blah.js

onmessage = function (event) {
event.data //the data throw in during mains postmessage 
...
postMessage("throwing back response"); 
}

So main posts data to the worker, the worker gets it in it's onmessage and the original data is accessed by looking at event.data. When the worker is done is throws data back to main by calling postMessage, where the onmessage is main catches it.


Really Unsung Hero's

The other features I put in for these releases such as finally making the test tags working. Marking the end in an era where I had options on the front page of index.html that never did anything. Additionally getting to features that my one user so far wanted! Notes per test to display additional text during run time. Lastly, this option I spent a better part of Friday afternoon hacking together. Allowing the user to see the blurred pixel results on their original canvases as seen below.

Some Problems

I need help! Look at my thread pool in Sundae.js  I want each blurring to use its own worker thread. Right now the blur worker is blurring both canvases. I cannot not figure out how to get both of these threads running asynchronously and actually blurring the right canvases. If anyone has design advice drop a bug at lighthouse or comment below.