[Bf-committers] Blender Web Plugin :: Thread vs Fork

Marcelo Coraça de Freitas mfreitas at ydeasolutions.com.br
Thu Sep 25 22:51:05 CEST 2008


Hello all,

    Something occurred to me right about now.

    The original problem with the Firefox Blender Web Plug-in is that
there was a dirty lock for rendering with OpenGl in the plugin Window.
That's solved with xembed. What just occurred to be is that, with
xembed, there is no real need for forking the process.

    Even though forking the process gives us more stability, as if
blender crashes the browser keeps going, it's a lot slower than threads
(simply because for each plugin instance there will be needed to
initialize the entire game engine - load the engine code into the memory
and running it's main - and harder to script - even using dbus.

    If we work with threads that's solved. And we also gain something
that's quite important: the ActiveX plugin work with threads and there
is no locking in the opengl context (there is a data locking for
something I didn't quite understand yet, but I've seen some examples
over the web where people render OpenGL into the control's window
without locking anything!

    We could have then a common code in both web plugins. But there is
also another problem. The game player uses some global variables (I know
only about one, the G variable - which has gave me some headaches in the
past plugin code), so refactoring is needed in order to implement this
approach. But, once it's achieved we'd have a code that's easier to
maintain - as the plugin and the stand alone player would be different
applications, sharing a great part of the code.

    Those are only initial thoughts. I might come up with some testing
code so I can make sure it'll work as expected. :)


Regards,



Marcelo Coraça de Freitas 
Gerente de TI 

Ydea Desenvolvimento de Software LTDA. 
Av. Adolfo Pinheiro, 2338 - Alto da Boa Vista 
CEP.:04734-004 - São Paulo - SP 
Tel.: 55-11-5523-0333
Tel.: 55-11-8685-1429
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