Argh!!… Your web application has to sort a lot of data and you get the dreaded error message… “A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding…” Or maybe you’re writing some image processing code that takes forever on large images… Your UI is non-responsive. What are you going to do!!?… You could try to break up the work into small pieces and use timers to spread out the work. But what a PITA!
What if JavaScript had the ability to run your code in the background and not interfere with the responsiveness of your UI. What if you could spawn a thread to do long running computations such as image filtering and sorting. Well with HTML5 Web Workers you can do just that! In the rest of this article, I’m going to teach you how to use Web Workers within your own applications. Click here to try the sample app.
