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

Worker environments


Web worker environments aren't same as the typical JavaScript environment, where our code usually runs. In this section, we'll point out critical differences between the JavaScript environment of the main thread and web worker threads.

What's available, what isn't?

A common misconception of web workers is that they're radically different environments from the default JavaScript execution context. It's true that they're different, but not so different as to be unapproachable. Perhaps, it's for this reason that JavaScript developers shy away from using web workers when they could be beneficial.

The obvious gap is the DOM—it doesn't exist in web worker execution environments. Its absence was a conscious decision on the part of specification writers. By avoiding DOM integration into worker threads, browser vendors can avoid many potential edge cases. We all value browser stability over convenience, or at least, we should. And would it really be all that convenient to have DOM...