Unlock the Power of Web Workers in Your React App
When it comes to developing for the web, JavaScript’s single-threaded nature can be a significant limitation. However, web workers offer a solution to this problem by allowing you to run JavaScript files in separate threads. But why don’t we use them more often? The answer lies in the complexity of interacting with web workers.
The Ceremony of Web Workers
Imagine having to move a calculation into a worker thread. It’s not a straightforward process, and the resulting code can be difficult to understand. What if you could write code that looks like this instead?
Introducing Comlink
Comlink, a library developed by Google, provides an RPC-like experience for web workers. By using Comlink, we can simplify the process of interacting with web workers and make our code more maintainable.
A Real-World Use Case: Offloading Long-Running Tasks
Let’s create a TypeScript web app using create-react-app and demonstrate how to integrate Comlink into our application. We’ll start by creating a takeALongTimeToDoSomething.ts file that simulates a long-running task.
Hello, Worker-Plugin and Comlink!
To use Comlink, we need to eject our create-react-app application and install the necessary packages, including worker-plugin and comlink. We’ll then tweak our webpack.config.js to use the worker-plugin.
Workerizing Our Slow Process
Next, we’ll create a new folder called my-first-worker and add a tsconfig.json file to tell TypeScript that this is a web worker. We’ll also create an index.ts file that will serve as our worker.
Consuming Our Worker
Now that we have our worker set up, let’s change our index.tsx file to use it. We’ll import the wrap function from Comlink and create a local takeALongTimeToDoSomething function that wraps interacting with our worker.
The Benefits of Web Workers
When we run our application, we’ll notice that it’s now non-blocking, and our long-running function is not preventing the UI from updating. The functionality is lazily loaded via a my-first-worker.chunk.worker.js file created by the worker-plugin and comlink.
Using Web Workers in React
Let’s take our web worker usage to the next level and plug it into our React application. We’ll create a simple adder function that takes some values and returns their total. Then, we’ll update our App.tsx file to use this function and create a simple adder component.
The Power of Web Workers in Action
When we try out our application, we’ll notice that entering a single digit locks the UI for five seconds while it adds the numbers. But what if we web worker-ify this? We’ll update our my-first-worker/index.ts file to import our new function and create a shareable worker Hooks approach.
Try It Out!
Now our calculation takes place off the main thread, and the UI is no longer blocked! With Comlink and web workers, we can unlock the full potential of our React applications and provide a better user experience.
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