Book Image

JavaScript Concurrency

By : Adam Boduch
Book Image

JavaScript Concurrency

By: Adam Boduch

Overview of this book

Concurrent programming may sound abstract and complex, but it helps to deliver a better user experience. With single threaded JavaScript, applications lack dynamism. This means that when JavaScript code is running, nothing else can happen. The DOM can’t update, which means the UI freezes. In a world where users expect speed and responsiveness – in all senses of the word – this is something no developer can afford. Fortunately, JavaScript has evolved to adopt concurrent capabilities – one of the reasons why it is still at the forefront of modern web development. This book helps you dive into concurrent JavaScript, and demonstrates how to apply its core principles and key techniques and tools to a range of complex development challenges. Built around the three core principles of concurrency – parallelism, synchronization, and conservation – you’ll learn everything you need to unlock a more efficient and dynamic JavaScript, to lay the foundations of even better user experiences. Throughout the book you’ll learn how to put these principles into action by using a range of development approaches. Covering everything from JavaScript promises, web workers, generators and functional programming techniques, everything you learn will have a real impact on the performance of your applications. You’ll also learn how to move between client and server, for a more frictionless and fully realized approach to development. With further guidance on concurrent programming with Node.js, JavaScript Concurrency is committed to making you a better web developer. The best developers know that great design is about more than the UI – with concurrency, you can be confident every your project will be expertly designed to guarantee its dynamism and power.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
JavaScript Concurrency
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 10. Building a Concurrent Application

We've now covered all the major areas that JavaScript has to offer in terms of concurrency. We've seen the browser and how the JavaScript interpreter fits into this environment. We've looked at the few language mechanisms that assist with writing concurrent code, and we've learned how to write concurrent JavaScript in the back-end. In this chapter, we're going to try and put this all together by building a simple chat application.

It's worth noting upfront that this isn't a basic rehash of individual topics covered in earlier chapters, which would serve no real purpose. Instead, we're going to focus more on the concurrency decisions that we have to make during the initial implementation of the app, adapting earlier ideas learned in this book wherever appropriate. It's the design of concurrency semantics we put to use in our code that matters much more so than the actual mechanism that's used to do so.

We'll start with a brief foray into the pre...