What is a Web Worker?

Question

I went through this Discussion:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7087036/fetching-images-from-server-while-drawing-the-cell

I have a web server server-1.example.com. There is a JSON-Server running on another server server-2.example.com. What I have to achieve is to fetch a list of URLs (in form of JSON response) from server-2 and loop through the urls and fetch them from the server-1. In the meantime i have to animate these images on the browser by Fading the images one after the another.

The algorithm is something like this:-

START:
   FETCH the URLs from server-1 and store them in a cache C
   Loop until C.length
      Fetch first K images by forking a thread.
      animate k images
 END

How can I optimize K? Is my approach right?

Answer 1

A web worker is a JavaScript which runs in the background.

Answer 2

When executing scripts in an HTML page, the page becomes unresponsive until the script is finished.
A web worker is a JavaScript that runs in the background, independently of other scripts, without affecting the performance of the page. You can continue to do whatever you want: clicking, selecting things, etc., while the web worker runs in the background.