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

Promise terminology


Before we dive right into the code examples, let's take a minute to make sure we have a firm grasp on the terminology surrounding promises. There are promise instances, but then there are also various states and actions to consider. The sections that follow will make much more sense if we can nail down the promise lexicon. These explanations are short and sweet, so if you've already used promises, you can quickly gloss over these definitions to sanity check your knowledge.

Promise

As the name suggests, a promise is, well, a promise. Think of a promise as a proxy for a value that doesn't exist yet. The promise let's us write better concurrent code because we know that the value will be there at some point, and we don't have to write lots of state-checking boilerplate code.

State

Promises are always in one of three states:

  • Pending: This is the first state of a promise after it's been created. It remains in a pending state until it's fulfilled or rejected.

  • Fulfilled: The promise...