May 2012
Intermediate to advanced
62 pages
1h 2m
English
Content preview from Web Workers
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Chapter 1. Overview
Modern web applications would often run better if there was a way to perform heavy calculations in the background instead of making the user interface wait for them to complete. The Web Workers specification[1] defines an API for running computationally intensive code in a thread other than the web application user interface. Long tasks can run without affecting your interface’s memory and CPU footprint because the Worker will live in its own thread.
Multi-threaded programing is a complicated subject well stocked with complex algorithms and theoretical discussion. You can find other languages (e.g., Java) that give their developers a library to mask some of the complexity[2]. The good news is that Web Workers provides a nice and simple API that lets you be very productive without worrying too much about deadlocks and similar problems.
Web Workers promises to end the unfriendly “unresponsive script” dialogs like the ones shown in Figure 1-1 and Figure 1-2.
Figure 1-1. The warning dialog for “unresponsive script” in Windows
Figure 1-2. The warning dialog for “unresponsive script” in MacOS
What Can Web Workers Do?
If your web application needs to complete a task that takes more than 150 milliseconds, you should consider using a Web Worker. If your app needs to feel like a ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.