Using Web Workers with RequireJS

This is a simple plugin that allows you to declare a dependency on a web worker script using requireJS with a simple syntax. See here for primer on Web Workers.

define(["worker!my-web-worker"], function(worker) {
	worker.onmessage = function (event) {
		alert("I got me a message!");
	};
});

The plugin will return an initialized Worker object which will resolve the given module ID with the currently configured requireJS configuration (no need to hardcode script paths just for web workers).

If Worker is not defined (IE < 10), the plugin will load a fake Worker implementation so that your scripts can utilize the same Worker API whether the browser supports it or not.

Install with Bower

bower install requirejs-web-workers

Then add src/worker.js and src/worker-fake.js to your project.

How to Run Example Page

The example page just loops and counts to a very large number on a background thread. In order to run the example, you will need to run index.html from a server (e.g. localhost) rather than the file:// protocol for web workers to work.

To run the example with a lightweight node server, first install dependencies:

npm install

Make sure you have grunt-cli installed if you don't already have it:

npm install grunt-cli -g

Then, run the server and load the example page:

npm start

This will spin up a server at localhost:1337 and open your web browser.