Porting high-performance applications to the web

Abstract

The World Wide Web, traditionally only used for static content, has grown in size, reach, and capability over the past few years. Web pages have turned into full featured web applications and web browsers have dramatically improved their interoperability, performance, stability, and security. This means developers can move more and more advanced applications to the web. This move initially started with simple applications like e-mail clients. Nowadays, developers can use new web standards to move very complex and high-performance applications to the web as well.

In this thesis we perform a case-study of the state of the web as an application platform, with a focus on performance. We start with an in-depth analysis of the architecture of a modern web browser and try to understand key architectural and performance concepts. We also look at the developer tools available in modern web browsers. Some aspects of the internal workings of the Google Chrome web browser are investigated in more detail as well: the performance of a getImageData call on a hardware accelerated canvas and the garbage collection of WebGLRenderingContext objects.

We also propose and implement two proof of concepts. The first extends WebGL with support for text rendering and handwritten lines (annotations). The second implements a remote WebGL rendering solution where the actual rendering of a WebGL canvas is done by a remote system and the result is streamed back to the client. The goal here is to make complex WebGL applications usable on low-end devi