Hi there, My apologies in case this topic has already been discussed before.
It is well known that one of the biggest bottlenecks in web application performance are DOM operations. While the recommendation to developers is to try to not update the DOM and trigger reflows if it is not completely necessary, doing this is extremely difficult and doesn't really scale with big applications, like many of Gaia's system apps. There are some ideas on how to improve that, along with some projects that have come up with pretty elegant solutions. As an example, React.js has worked around that problem by recreating the DOM with lightweight JavaScript objects, along with a W3C-compliant event system. When developers change the DOM or trigger events, they don't have to worry about causing reflows or slowing down the application, since they are not modifying the real DOM, but the virtual DOM. React then applies these changes, and through some smart optimizations, diff algorithms and event delegation, figures out what has changed and batches all the DOM operations at the end of the event loop. A much better technical explanation of how this works can be found here[2]. There are other attempts at batching DOM operations like fastdom[3]. In any case, it makes sense that these efforts result in big performance improvements, according to benchmarks[4, 5]. This would be even more significant in mobile platforms like Firefox OS. Far from proposing to use React.js in Gaia, I still think that automatically batching the changes that DOM operations cause at the end of the event loop is a good idea that will benefit apps performance in Gaia enormously. Have there been any thoughts on implementing anything similar for Firefox OS? Is it worth it to look into it or even propose an implementation of the idea? Cheers, Sergi [1]: http://facebook.github.io/react/ [2]: http://calendar.perfplanet.com/2013/diff/ [3]: http://wilsonpage.co.uk/preventing-layout-thrashing/ [4]: http://swannodette.github.io/2013/12/17/the-future-of-javascript-mvcs/ [4]: http://wilsonpage.co.uk/preventing-layout-thrashing/ _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
