useWorker

Introduction to useWorker

useWorker is an innovative library designed to enhance the efficiency of React applications by utilizing web workers. This tool provides a straightforward React hook that simplifies the integration of web workers, thus offloading intensive computations from the main browser thread, ensuring a smoother user interface experience.

🎨 Features

useWorker offers several significant features aimed at boosting the performance of your application:

• Non-blocking Execution: It allows the execution of heavy operations without freezing the user interface, making applications more responsive.
• Promise-based API: Instead of dealing with complex event messaging, useWorker provides a cleaner, promise-based approach.
• Minimal Package Size: The library is lightweight, loading at less than 3KB.
• Comprehensive API: It comes with a clear, easy-to-use API tailored for React applications.
• TypeScript Support: Developers can leverage TypeScript for better code quality and development efficiency.
• Garbage Collection: It automatically manages the collection of unneeded web worker instances.
• Remote Dependencies: You can integrate external dependencies directly within your worker functions.
• Timeout Option: Configure operations with a timeout to ensure they don’t run indefinitely.

💾 Installation

To get started with useWorker, simply install it via npm:

npm install --save @koale/useworker

This makes integration quick and hassle-free.

🔨 Import and Usage

Once installed, you can import useWorker into your React component like this:

import { useWorker, WORKER_STATUS } from "@koale/useworker";

Then use it to perform computations asynchronously:

import React from "react";
import { useWorker } from "@koale/useworker";

const numbers = [...Array(5000000)].map((e) => Math.floor(Math.random() * 1000000));
const sortNumbers = (nums) => nums.sort();

const Example = () => {
  const [sortWorker] = useWorker(sortNumbers);

  const runSort = async () => {
    const result = await sortWorker(numbers); // This will not block the UI
    console.log(result);
  };

  return (
    <button type="button" onClick={runSort}>
      Run Sort
    </button>
  );
};

🍞 Demo and Examples

There are practical demos available, such as Sorting 50,000 random numbers and CSV processing, allowing developers to see useWorker in action. These examples demonstrate how the library can handle complex tasks efficiently.

🤔 Motivation and Limitations

The motivation behind useWorker is to provide an easy way to leverage web workers in React applications, especially for those using Create React App (CRA) which does not natively support web workers without manual configuration changes. However, developers should be aware of potential issues with transpilation tools like Babel, which can cause references errors if functions are moved out of scope.

💻 Contribution and Support

useWorker is maintained by a dedicated team and community of contributors. The project is open-source, inviting developers to report bugs, suggest enhancements, or contribute to the codebase. The source code and issue discussions can be found on GitHub.

📜 License

The useWorker library is released under the MIT License, ensuring that it remains free and accessible for personal and commercial use.

Overall, useWorker is a powerful hook that simplifies the use of web workers in React, allowing developers to enhance performance while maintaining a seamless user experience.