Before web workers, everything on the client side took place in a single thread, making it hard to do serious number crunching without blocking UI updates. Now web workers bring multi-threading to the browser.

In this talk, Derek King will cover:

• An in-depth exploration of the API.
• When to use them and how to get the best out of them.
• Where web workers are today, in terms of browser support.
• How to make full use of web workers and manage fall-back to alternatives.

To illustrate some of these aspects, Derek will demonstrate an implementation of an image editor within the browser. There'll be a bit of photography theory and a bit of easel.js. The aim will be to create something truly practical, and a set of adjustments with subjective finesse.

Derek has been a keen photographer since his teens - check out his Flickr stream. He started programming in 1985, and since 2000 has been developing interactive activities and applications for educational publishers in Flash and JavaScript. Now he is focussing on JavaScript and is enjoying investigating current libraries and practices.

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