Book Image

Javascript Unlocked

Book Image

Javascript Unlocked

Overview of this book

JavaScript stands bestride the world like a colossus. Having conquered web development, it now advances into new areas such as server scripting, desktop and mobile development, game scripting, and more. One of the most essential languages for any modern developer, the fully-engaged JavaScript programmer need to know the tricks, non-documented features, quirks, and best practices of this powerful, adaptive language. This all-practical guide is stuffed with code recipes and keys to help you unlock the full potential of JavaScript. Start by diving right into the core of JavaScript, with power user techniques for getting better maintainability and performance from the basic building blocks of your code. Get to grips with modular programming to bring real power to the browser, master client-side JavaScript scripting without jQuery or other frameworks, and discover the full potential of asynchronous coding. Do great things with HTML5 APIs, including building your first web component, tackle the essential requirements of writing large-scale applications, and optimize JavaScript’s performance behind the browser. Wrap up with in-depth advice and best practice for debugging and keeping your JavaScript maintainable for scaling, long-term projects. With every task demonstrated in both classic ES5 JavaScript and next generation ES6-7 versions of the language, Whether read cover-to-cover or dipped into for specific keys and recipes, JavaScript Unlocked is your essential guide for pushing JavaScript to its limits.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
JavaScript Unlocked
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Boosting performance with JavaScript workers


JavaScript is a single-threaded environment. So, multiple scripts cannot really run simultaneously. Yes, we use setTimeout(), setInterval(), XMLHttpRequest and event handlers to run tasks asynchronously. So we gain non-blocking execution, but this doesn't mean concurrency. However, using web workers, we can run one or more scripts in the background independent of the UI scripts. Web workers are long running scripts that are not interrupted by blocking UI events. Web workers utilize multithreading, so we can benefit from multicore CPUs.

Well, where can we use web workers? Anywhere where we do processor-intensive calculations and don't want them blocking the UI thread. It can be graphics, web games, crypto, and Web I/O. We cannot manipulate the DOM from a web worker directly, but we have access to XMLHttpRequest, Web Storage, IndexedDB, FileSystem API, Web Sockets and other features.

So let's see what these web workers are in practice. By and large...