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

Writing concurrent code


Concurrent programming is hard to get right. Even with contrived example applications, the bulk of complexity comes from concurrent code. We obviously want our code to be readable while keeping the benefits of concurrency. We want to get the most out of each CPU on the system. We only want to compute what we need, when we need it. We don't want spaghetti code that joins together several asynchronous operations. Focusing on all these aspects of concurrent programming while developing applications detracts from what we should really be focusing on—the features that give our application value.

In this section, we'll look at the approaches that we might use to insulate the rest of our application from tricky concurrency bits. This generally means making concurrency the default mode—even when there's no real concurrency happening under the hood. In the end, we don't want our code to contain 90% concurrency acrobatics and 10% functionality.

Hiding the concurrency mechanism...