Intro to JS Web Workers

89 points by brian_cooksey 12 years ago | 9 comments

gliese1337 12 years ago |

Inlining a worker with an ObjectURL is brilliant. It nicely solves the issue of worker script urls being resolved relative to the page, rather than relative to the URL of the calling script. I had previously solved that problem just by having the parent script read a global variable with the proper absolute path to the worker's location, but this is much nicer.

camus 12 years ago | |

gosh , it's a killer trick!

VeejayRampay 12 years ago |

Web Workers are a good example of those new technologies that the HTML5 Javascript APIs expose to programmers that we don't really have found a real-life use for as of now...

Just like WebSockets really, you can feel the obvious potential but I have yet to encounter a good example of how Web Workers will help the average web developer to solve his problems in a more efficient or elegant manner.

The fact that they can't manipulate the DOM in a simple way is probably one of the reasons why they haven't crossed the mainstream line. That or the still approximative support across browsers.

Or maybe it's just that they're too much of a game changer and we've yet to wrap our heads around their power. I don't know...

jwoah12 12 years ago | |

My side project[1] is an interactive table component that allows the user to provide the table data through an arbitrary callback. I allow the use to either pass an actual function or a reference to inline code that will be instantiated as a web worker. I figure there may be a case in which the user is creating the dataset in some expensive way, but it can happen in a separate thread and not tie up the UI. Then the worker passes the final data back to the UI thread to render. It would make sense that any intensive calculations should happen on the server, but I wanted to leave the option open.

[1] - http://jarwol.com/aTable/

jwoah12 12 years ago |

I use Blobs to instantiate workers in one of my side projects, and it has always made me wonder: Why isn't the option to instantiate a web worker using inline code built in to the browser APIs?

Everlag 12 years ago |

Why is this being upvoted? I will say it is a well written tutorial but the content is basically completely stripped from html5rocks. There is an overabundance of sites with this topic and a simple google will reveal that.

I happen to know this because I was starting to use web workers about 6 hours ago. And yes, html5rocks does include the blob trick.

lobo_tuerto 12 years ago | |

Where is your contribution? Usually if someone have better resources than the one submitted they post an array of links to these curated info.

bhauer 12 years ago |

That is a great summary. Thank you for writing this up!

Even without the context of minification, I like your use of Blobs to instantiate a Web Worker.

nej 12 years ago |

Multi-threaded JavaScript sounds so dreamy