A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms in JavaScript, Volume 1

Queues in Action

Queues are common in many applications, ranging from printing jobs to background workers in web applications.

Let’s say we’re programming a simple JavaScript interface for a printer that can accept printing jobs from various computers across a network. We want to make sure we print each document in the order in which it was received.

This code uses our implementation of the Queue class from earlier:

import Queue from './queue.js';

class PrintManager {
  constructor() {
    this.queue = new Queue();
  }

  queuePrintJob(document) {
    this.queue.enqueue(document);
  }

  run() {
    while (this.queue.read()) {
      this.printDocument(this.queue.dequeue());
    }
  }

  printDocument(document) {
    // Code ...