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

Building callback chains


Each promise method that we examined so far in this chapter returns promises. This allows us to call these methods again on the return value, resulting in a chain of then().then() calls, and so forth. One challenging aspect of chaining promise calls together is that the instances returned by promise methods are new instances. That is, there's a degree of immutability to the promises that we'll explore in this section.

As our application gets larger, the concurrency challenges grow with it. This means that we need to think of better ways to leverage synchronization primitives, such as promises. Just as any other primitive value in JavaScript, we can pass them around from function to function. We have to treat promises in the same way—passing them around, and building upon the chain of callback functions.

Promises only change state once

Promises are born into a pending state, and they die in either a resolved or rejected state. Once a promise has transitioned into one...