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

Creating tasks using timers


So far in this chapter, we've had a look at all the inner workers of the web browser environment, and where the JavaScript interpreter fits in this environment. What does all this have to do with applying concurrency principles to our code? With the knowledge of what's happening under the hood, we have a greater insight into what's happening when a given chunk of our code is run. Particularly, we know what's happening relative to other code chunks; time ordering is a crucial concurrency property.

This being said, let's actually write some code. In this section, we'll use timers to explicitly add tasks to the task queue. We'll also learn when and where the JavaScript interpreter jumps in and starts executing our code.

Using setTimeout()

The setTimeout() function is staple in any JavaScript code. It's used to execute code at some point in the future. New JavaScript programmers often trip over the setTimeout() function because it's a timer. At a set point in the future...