I'm working on an application in which I load html pages and do some stuff with them. As it is now I'm using the loadStrings function to get the page so the whole application stops until the page is loaded.

Is there a way to load the page in the background while the rest of the application is still running? So the draw loop would continue looping and once the file is loaded another function fires which processes the page? Actionscript uses on onload event to perform this function.

you'll have to do some multithreading.  what i'd probably do myself is make a class that both stores the string array and handles the threaded loading.  this code is on-the-fly, just to give the ideas, you'll have to debug it yourself, 'k?

Code:

// first, the class:

class ASL extends Thread {
  String filename;
  String [] strings;
  boolean loaded;
  ASL(String filename) { this.filename=filename; }
  void run() { strings=loadStrings(filename); loaded=true; }
}

// then, use it something like this:

ASL asl;
void setup() {
  asl = new ASL("http://processing.org/discourse/yabb2/YaBB.pl");
  asl.start();
}
void draw() {
  // check status so:
  println("has it finished loading yet?  " + asl.loaded);
  // once loaded use its data so:
  if (asl.loaded) {
    println(asl.strings.length);
    // then some sort of check to not repeat "onload" forever
    exit();
  }
}
 

hth