socialist

$ npm install socialist

Launch a Web Worker that can require() in the browser with browserify. For browsers that don't support Web Workers or construction of Web Workers from blob urls socialist falls back to a minimal Web Worker mock. The mock runs on the main thread, so you don't get any of the multithreading benefits of Web Worker. However, it should be "good enough" for the less-compliant browsers.

socialist supports all modern browsers, tested on IE 9+, Chrome 16+, FireFox 5+, Safari 6+, Opera 12+, iOS 8.3+.

• socialist(require(modulePath), [forceMock])
  Return a new WebWorker from the module at modulePath. The file at modulePath should export its worker code in module.exports as a function that will be run with no arguments. Note that all the code outside of the module.exports function will be run in the main thread too so don't put any computationally intensive code in that part. It is necessary for the main code to require() the worker code to fetch the module reference and load modulePath's dependency graph into the bundle output. The second argument forceMock is optional, if a true socialist returns a Web Worker mock.

• WebWorker.postMessage()
  Sends a message - which can consist of any JavaScript object to the worker's inner scope.

• WebWorker.addEventListener()
  Register an event handler of a specific event type on the Worker.

Example

// main.js
'use strict'
const socialist = require('socialist')
const worker    = socialist(require('./worker.js'))

worker.addEventListener('message', function (event) {
  console.log(event.data) // pong
})

worker.postMessage('ping')

// worker.js
'use strict'
module.exports = function (worker) {
  worker.addEventListener('message', function (event) {
    if (event.data === 'ping') {
        worker.postMessage('pong')
    }
  })
}

Thanks

Thanks to James Halliday and Browserify community.

Thanks to BrowserStack for providing the infrastructure that allows us to run our build in real browsers.

License

socialist is released under the terms of the BSD-3-Clause license.

This software includes or is derivative of works distributed under the licenses listed below. Please refer to the specific files and/or packages for more detailed information about the authors, copyright notices, and licenses.

• webworkify is released under the terms of the MIT license.