Searching for web workers

At Bocoup, we love working on the latest problems in front-end development such as parallel processing, best practices in web application development, and media-rich experiences. This is why we consider the folks at HookFlash kindred spirits; they have made browser-based peer-to-peer communication their “thing”. We recently had the privilege of working with the HookFlash team, […]

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Open Peer and the Frontiers of WebRTC

• Tagged in:
• open source,
• web standards

While poking around the Web Worker API in the latest Opera Beta Release, I discovered that they had also implemented support for Shared Web Workers. If you’re not familiar with Shared Web Workers, have a look here. The basic premise is that a Shared Worker can have multiple connections made to one Worker. Paraphrased from […]

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Javascript Web Workers: Opera 10.6 Beta Supports SharedWorkers

• Tagged in:
• performance,
• tools and workflow

Opera 10.60 Beta was announced this week and along with the list of new HTML5 features it’s supporting was Web Workers. Of course I was excited to run it through the renderer/worker test suite I set up for my previous posts about Safari 5 and Chrome 5. The results were pleasing, the first Opera release […]

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Javascript Web Workers: Opera 10.60 Beta Supports Complex Messages

• Tagged in:
• performance,
• tools and workflow

Following the announcement of Safari 5 [ 5.0 (7533.16) ] today, I did some due diligence and ran it through the json-object, array, boolean and string Worker message cases that I had produced for testing against Chrome 5. The results are in and thankfully consistent – so not much to report here accept that – […]

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Javascript Web Workers: Safari 5 Now Supports Complex Messages

• Tagged in:
• performance,
• tools and workflow

After updating to Chrome 5 (specifically 5.0.375.55) last night I immediately ran some tests to see if the Web Worker API had been updated to support postMessage() arguments of types other than string. Turns out, it had. Here’s the test, plus the results: https://gist.github.com/414901 renderer.html <script src=”renderer.js”></script> renderer.js var worker = new Worker(‘worker.js’); worker.addEventListener(‘message’, function […]

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Javascript Web Workers: Chrome 5 Now Supports Complex Messages

• Tagged in:
• performance,
• tools and workflow

I’m a jQuery enthusiast. Maybe even an evangelist. So I decided to make workers easy for my fellow jQuery developers – and thus was born the jQuery.Hive. Inititally it began it’s life as PollenJS a jQuery-looking library of functions that were light, useful and thread-safe. This was before the WebKit implementation existed so everything was […]

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Javascript Web Workers: From Basics to jQuery.Hive, Part III

• Tagged in:
• performance,
• tools and workflow,
• tutorial,
• web applications,
• web standards

As I mentioned in Part I, the Web Worker API is available for use in Firefox 3.5+, Safari 4+ and Chrome 4+, however the implementations are inconsistant. This has been completely overlooked by every single tutorial I’ve found. The issue revolves around the accepted argument to postMessage() (from both the main window and the worker). […]

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Javascript Web Workers: From Basics to jQuery.Hive, Part II (Browser Implementations)

• Tagged in:
• performance,
• tools and workflow,
• tutorial,
• web applications,
• web standards

This is long overdue. Also, it should serve as a context for my slides from jQuery Conference, San Francisco 2010 (use the up and down arrow keys to navigate). Whether or not you’ve read the WHATWG Web Worker spec and are looking for more information about Javascript multi threading OR you already have a rudimentary […]

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Javascript Web Workers: From Basics to jQuery.Hive

• Tagged in:
• performance,
• tools and workflow,
• tutorial,
• web applications,
• web standards

For those with short attention spans, here’s how you call the function: map(enumerable, mapFunction, callback, numWorkers); I wanted an easy way to divide up a parallelizable task with Web Workers, so I create a Worker enabled Map function for arrays and objects. It works just like the map function in your favorite functional languages, except […]

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JavaScript Enumerable.Map() with WebWorkers

• Tagged in:
• performance,
• tools and workflow

As a follow up to my previous post regarding Javascript Web Workers, I’m pleased to announce the release of PollenJS, the first worker-specific javascript library: PollenJS on github PollenJS offers the following: Utility Methods fn trim each to_array in_array clone last unique merge filter map keys values isArr isFn isStr isNum isUndef isNull extend JSON […]

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PollenJS: Javascript Web Workers Library

• Tagged in:
• performance,
• tools and workflow