Igniter

Intelligent Work Distribution for JavaScript Applications.

About

Igniter allows you to schedule work in ways that best align with the browser's render cycle, minimizing forced layouts, reducing instances of duplicated work, and giving us highly granular timing and order of operation guarantees.

Tasks in Igniter are scheduled into a Queue within a Frame either directly or via a Timer, a Deadline, or a Buffer.

Frames

Types of work are divided into Event, Layout, Measure and Idle. frames. These frames have unique timing guarantees and purposed queues.

The purposed queues are emptied in the order they are specified below. Emptying is linear, it will not cycle back, but appending to an active queue is valid.

All frames have a cleanup queue at the end, which will empty anything that's been scheduled for cleanup at that point.

There is also a specialized next queue which flushes with an as soon as possible policy and is similar in nature to requestAnimationFrame in that you always schedule into the upcoming flush, unless you are currently flushing the next queue, in which case you schedule into the next next flush.

EventFrame

• sync // do these things first
• actions // do these things second
• cleanup

LayoutFrame

• render
• afterRender // deprecated, here for legacy backburner support
• destroy // deprecated, here for legacy backburner support
• cleanup

MeasureFrame

• measure // read DOM properties here
• affect // edit DOM properties here
• cleanup

IdleFrame

• idle // work that's just less important, but more aggresive idle than ric
• collect // work that will result in a major GC event (emptying a large array / releasing a large DOM tree)
• cleanup

Buffers

Buffers allow you do create a "yielding" task that captures scheduled work and delivers it to the appropriate Frame and Queue only once that task is complete. Buffers can accept deadlines, with a specialized option of finishBeforeRender: true being available.

Deadlines

Render Metadata

Polyfills

This library functionally polyfills requestAnimationFrame for IE9. It polyfills MicroTasks for IE9 and IE10. It polyfills requestIdleCallback for non-chrome browsers.

Using with external libs that use requestAnimationFrame

When using igniter with a library in which you do not control the scheduling of asynchronous tasks, it is best if you can supply that lib our customized raf.

import {
  requestAnimationFrame,
  cancelAnimationFrame
} from 'igniter/raf';

...

// override external lib raf usage