Description

This is a small proof on concept showing how to generate a d3 SVG chart in a web worker and pass it back to the main UI thread to be injected into a webpage.

This PoC leverages jsdom's experimental integration into the browser to generate a virtual DOM given web workers don't have direct access to the actual DOM. d3 will happily use jsdom's document to generate an SVG chart - pertty cool!

Integrating jsdom into the browser with Browserify was discussed here. I also lifted code from a gist that demonstrated how to generate a d3 chart with a force layout. The chart example comes from the d3 docs.

Instructions

1. Clone the repo

2. run npm install

3. run npm start - This will generate a browser-compatible jsdom bundle, set a watch on the source files, and fire up a server on http://localhost:8999. This script works on Windows, you may want to execute the scripts separately on Mac/*nix machines.