Web Workers

Chapter 5. Shared Workers

Shared Web Workers allow multiple web application instances to communicate with a single instance of a shared Worker. Shared Web Workers will be identified by the name or the URL that you provide in their constructor. You instantiate them by creating a new SharedWorker.

One way to leverage shared workers in your web application is by using a single shared Worker as a central point of communication with a server. Multiple Workers can be opened and all view the same picture through the shared Worker. Instead of directly communicating with your servers, the web app will communicate with a shared Worker that buffers changes locally and communicates with the server when online.

The shared worker can also use HTML5 offline capabilities^[7] to persist the state of the data and communicate it to the server, based on your web application logic. It’s a long-lived task that gives your application the option of persisting data between all open windows and tabs. It also allows your Model (as in the Model-View-Controller design pattern^[8]) to be elegantly encapsulated in one central place.

Other good uses for shared Workers include the following:

• Providing a single source of truth for any type of logic that your app needs in more then one place (e.g., user identification, connection status, etc.).

• Ensuring data consistency between windows of the same web app.

• Reducing the memory consumption of multiple web app tabs/windows, by allowing some code (e.g., server communications) ...