We Keep Coding

What methods are blocking in Javascript?

I'm trying to override the standard confirm() method in Javascript (make a nice UI and stuff). I've read a 100 posts that it "can't be done", but I don't want to give up until I have given it a fair shot. :)
So, the real problem is of course that the confirm() method must block all javascript execution until the user selects an option. So, what are the methods in Javascript that have blocking behavior? I've been able to come up with 5:
alert() - does not suit me, because it displays an unwanted UI of its own;
confirm() - the same problem as alert();
infinite loop - even modern browsers will eat away CPU like crazy and display a "stop javascript?" prompt after a few seconds;
XmlHttpRequest in synchronous mode - sort of, but it involves server...
showModalDialog() - nice, but I need a specific design, plus there are some browser compatibility requirements...
The best approach I have so far is to create an <iframe> with the prompt (which then gets its own javascript execution thread) and block with XmlHttpRequest until the user has selected an option in the <iframe>. Unfortunately this involves passing the result forth and back between the server, and I'd like to make this 100% client-side. Also, it ties up a server thread while the dialog is opened, and there might be some browser-specific ajax-timeouts that apply.
Can anyone think of any other Javascript methods that block execution which might be (ab)used to achieve the desired effect?

No, it can't be done for a good reason. The arbitrary, custom-styled user interaction in the page is always asynchronous (event-based), and therefore does not work with any type of blocking behaviour (the event that would stop the infinite loop would only occur after the infinite loop has finished).
All those blocking methods that you mentioned do their user interaction in a different environment than the page - the alert/confirm/prompt popups controlled by the browser, the different page loaded by the showModalDialog - and that environment would need be able to gain focus while the first is frozen.
Creating a setup like this reliable is difficult enough. However, you could try almost every javascript functionality (that does not involve async callbacks), as all JS operations are synchronous by default. If you want to further experiment, I would suggest to look at those methods that deal with different DOM environments (window.open, document.write, iframe.contentWindow cross-frame-access) to see whether you can get any of these to spawn a second environment which runs in parallel reliably.

multi-core programming using JavaScript?

So I have this seriously recursive function that I would like to use with my code. The issue is it doesn't really take advantage of dual core machines because js is single threaded. I have tried using webworkers but don't really know much about multicore programming. Would someone point me to some material that could explain how it is done. I googled to find this sample link but its not really much help without documentation! =/
I would be glad if someone could show me how this could be done without webworkers though! That would be just awesome! =)
I came across this link on whatwg. This is really weird because it explains how to use multicore programming in webworkers etc, but on executing on my chrome browser it throws errors. Same goes with other browsers.
Error: 9Uncaught ReferenceError: Worker is not defined in worker.js

UPDATE (2018-06-21): For people coming here in search of multi-core programming in JavaScript, not necessarily browser JavaScript (for that, the answer still applies as-is): Node.js now supports multi-threading behind a feature flag (--experimental-workers): release info, relevant issue.
Writing this off the top of my head, no guarantees for source code. Please go easy on me.
As far as I know, you cannot really program in threads with JavaScript. Webworkers are a form of multi-programming; yet JavaScript is by its nature single-threaded (based on an event loop).
A webworker is seperate thread of execution in the sense that it doesn't share anything with the script that started it; there is no reference to the script's global object (typically called "window" in the browser), and no reference to any of your main script's variables other than data you send to the thread.
Think as the web worker as a little "server" that gets asked a question and provides an answer. You can only send strings to that server, and it can only parse the string and send back what it has computed.
// in the main script, one starts a worker by passing the file name of the
// script containing the worker to the constructor.
var w = new Worker("myworker.js");
// you want to react to the "message" event, if your worker wants to inform
// you of a result. The function typically gets the event as an argument.
w.addEventListener("message",
function (evt) {
// process evt.data, which is the message from the
// worker thread
alert("The answer from the worker is " + evt.data);
});
You can then send a message (a String) to this thread using its postMessage()-Method:
w.postMessage("Hello, this is my message!");
A sample worker script (an "echo" server) can be:
// this is another script file, like "myworker.js"
self.addEventListener("message",
function (evt) {
var data = JSON.parse(evt.data);
/* as an echo server, we send this right back */
self.postMessage(JSON.stringify(data))
})
whatever you post to that thread will be decoded, re-encoded, and sent back. of course you can do whatever processing you would want to do in between. That worker will stay active; you can call terminate() on it (in your main script; that'd be w.terminate()) to end it or calling self.close() in your worker.
To summarize: what you can do is you zip up your function parameters into a JSON string which gets sent using postMessage, decoded, and processed "on the other side" (in the worker). The computation result gets sent back to your "main" script.
To explain why this is not easier: More interaction is not really possible, and that limitation is intentional. Because shared resources (an object visible to both the worker and the main script) would be subject to two threads interfering with them at the same time, you would need to manage access (i.e., locking) to that resource in order to prevent race conditions.
The message-passing, shared-nothing approach is not that well-known mainly because most other programming languages (C and Java for example) use threads that operate on the same address space (while others, like Erlang, for instance, don't). Consider this:
It is really hard to code a larger project with mutexes (a mutual exclusion mechanism) because of the associated deadlock/race condition complexities. This is stuff that can make grown men cry!
It is really easy in comparison to do message-passing, shared-nothing semantics. The code is isolated; you know exactly what goes into your worker and what comes out of your worker. Deadlocks and race conditions are impossible to achieve!
Just try it out; it is capable of doing interesting things, probably all you want. Bear in mind that it is still implementation defined whether it takes advantage of multicore as far as I know.
NB. I just got informed that at least some implementations will handle JSON encoding of messages for you.
So, to give an answer to your question (it's all above; tl;dr version): No, you cannot do this without web workers. But there is nothing really wrong about web workers aside from browser support, as is the case with HTML5 in general.

As far as I remember this is only possible with the new HTML5 standard. The keyword is "Web-Worker"
See also:
HTML5: JavaScript Web Workers
JavaScript Threading With HTML5 Web Workers

Web workers are the answer to the client side. For NodeJS there are many approaches. Most popular - spawn several processes with pm2 or similar tool. Run single process and spawn/fork child processes. You can google around these and will find a lot of samples and tactics.
Web workers are already well supported by all browsers. https://caniuse.com/#feat=webworkers
API & samples: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers_API/Using_web_workers

Disabling script max-execution-time in flex?

How do I completely disable the max-execution-time for scripts in flex? The configurable max is 60 seconds, but I'm calling off to other interactive processes which will probably run much longer than that. Is there an easy way to disable the maximum script execution time across my entire application?

you can't. and probably, that's quite good. of course it's a pitty that you can't but when looking at the kind of things some people fabricate with the flash player, I am very happy.
For simplicity Adobe decided to promote a single threaded execution model that allows concurrent operations through asynchronous callbacks. sometimes this becomes anoying, verbous and even slower (performing a big calculation in a green thread simply takes longer than doing it directly). It's more of a political choice, so I guess the best you can do is live with it.
or you could explain what exactly you're up to, so I could propose a solution.
p.s.: there has been quite a lot of discussion going on about threads for background calculation. also, some people use seperate SWFs to perform calculation, or push it to pixel bender. also, you may wanna have a look at alchemy. it supports threading through relatively efficient continuation passing.

I have a long-running SOAP request that times-out with Error 1502. "Error #1502: A script has executed for longer than the default timeout period of 15 seconds."
I went to the right-click Properties dialog on the project in Flash Builder 4, then the Flex Compiler Options.
I set the Flex Compiler Options to "-locale en_US -default-script-limits 1000 60".
The locale was already there. It was the -default-script-limits that was cryptic to decipher from the compiler reference.
But I still got the fault with Error 1502 and 15 seconds. I even did a Project->Clean... command and tried again.
So, where is that 15 second timeout set? It turns out -- from some Googling and I'm not entirely sure -- that the Flex compiler accepts my setting, but the timeout message is fixed text with the 15 seconds message.
I also found that I could try: -default-script-limits 1000 65535. That didn't help either. This is from a posting on FlashDevelop.org 1
The bottom line for me is that I now need to page or otherwise divide up the information I am requesting in the SOAP call. My code still works fine for small requests.

Browser timing out JavaScript recursive function, how to solve?

I had to develop a newsletter manager with JS + PHP + MYSQL and I would like to know a few things on browser timing out the JS functions. If I'm running a recursive function that delays a call to itself (while PHP returns a list of email), how can I be sure that the browser won't timeout this JS function ?
I'm asking this, because I remember using a similar newsletter manager, that while doing the ajax requests, after a few calls, it stopped without any apparent reason. I know JS is not meant for this, and I should use Crontab on server, but, I can't assume the users server handles cron, so I had to stick with JS + php.
PS - This didn't happened on this app yet, I'm just trying to prevent the worse of the scenarios (since I've tested a newsletter manager, that worked the same as this one I'm developing). Since my dummy email list is small and the delays between calls are also small, this works just fine, but let's imagine a 1,000 contact list, with a delay between sends of 120 seconds: Sending 30 emails for each 2 minutes.
By the way, why this ? Well, many hosting servers has a limit on emails sent per day or hour and this helps preventing violating that policy.

from the mootools standpoint, there are several possible solutions here.
request.periodical - http://mootools.net/docs/more/Request/Request.Periodical
has plenty of options that allow for handling batches of jobs, look at it like a more complex .periodical (setInterval) that understands async nature of the result and can compensate for lag etc. I think it can literally do what you set in your requirements out of the box, all you need is an oncomplete callback that clears up the done from your pending array (for eg).
request.queue - http://mootools.net/docs/more/Request/Request.Queue
basically, setup all your requests to handle the chunks of data and pass them on to Request.Queue to handle sequentially. Probably less sophisticated from the point of view of sending rate control.

How about a meta refresh. That will not cause a timeout in your javascript function. You Just reload your page after a specific time and then send the next emails out. Adding a parameter to the URL you can find out which "round" you are on.
Can this do the job for you?

You need to use setTimeOut. The code needs to yield control to the UI thread and let the browser become responsive to avoid the script from being stopped.
Read this post by Nick Z.
http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2009/01/13/speed-up-your-javascript-part-1/
There is also something the W3C Spec about this called "Efficient Script Yielding" I'm not sure how far along it is or if any browsers support it.
https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webperf/raw-file/tip/specs/setImmediate/Overview.html
You could also try HTML5 Web Workers.

Are Mutexes needed in javascript?

I have seen this link: Implementing Mutual Exclusion in JavaScript.
On the other hand, I have read that there are no threads in javascript, but what exactly does that mean?
When events occur, where in the code can they interrupt?
And if there are no threads in JS, do I need to use mutexes in JS or not?
Specifically, I am wondering about the effects of using functions called by setTimeout() and XmlHttpRequest's onreadystatechange on globally accessible variables.

Javascript is defined as a reentrant language which means there is no threading exposed to the user, there may be threads in the implementation. Functions like setTimeout() and asynchronous callbacks need to wait for the script engine to sleep before they're able to run.
That means that everything that happens in an event must be finished before the next event will be processed.
That being said, you may need a mutex if your code does something where it expects a value not to change between when the asynchronous event was fired and when the callback was called.
For example if you have a data structure where you click one button and it sends an XmlHttpRequest which calls a callback the changes the data structure in a destructive way, and you have another button that changes the same data structure directly, between when the event was fired and when the call back was executed the user could have clicked and updated the data structure before the callback which could then lose the value.
While you could create a race condition like that it's very easy to prevent that in your code since each function will be atomic. It would be a lot of work and take some odd coding patterns to create the race condition in fact.

The answers to this question are a bit outdated though correct at the time they were given. And still correct if looking at a client-side javascript application that does NOT use webworkers.
Articles on web-workers:
multithreading in javascript using webworkers
Mozilla on webworkers
This clearly shows that javascript via web-workers has multithreading capabilities. As concerning to the question are mutexes needed in javascript? I am unsure of this. But this stackoverflow post seems relevant:
Mutual Exclusion for N Asynchronous Threads

Yes, mutexes can be required in Javascript when accessing resources that are shared between tabs/windows, like localStorage.
For example, if a user has two tabs open, simple code like the following is unsafe:
function appendToList(item) {
var list = localStorage["myKey"];
if (list) {
list += "," + item;
}
else {
list = item;
}
localStorage["myKey"] = list;
}
Between the time that the localStorage item is 'got' and 'set', another tab could have modified the value. It's generally unlikely, but possible - you'd need to judge for yourself the likelihood and risk associated with any contention in your particular circumstances.
See the following articles for a more detail:
Wait, Don't Touch That: Mutual Exclusion Locks & JavaScript - Medium Engineering
JavaScript concurrency and locking the HTML5 localStorage - Benjamin Dumke-von der Eh, Stackoverflow

As #william points out,
you may need a mutex if your code does something where it expects a
value not to change between when the asynchronous event was fired and
when the callback was called.
This can be generalised further - if your code does something where it expects exclusive control of a resource until an asynchronous request resolves, you may need a mutex.
A simple example is where you have a button that fires an ajax call to create a record in the back end. You might need a bit of code to protect you from trigger happy users clicking away and thereby creating multiple records. there are a number of approaches to this problem (e.g. disable the button, enable on ajax success). You could also use a simple lock:
var save_lock = false;
$('#save_button').click(function(){
if(!save_lock){
//lock
save_lock=true;
$.ajax({
success:function()
//unlock
save_lock = false;
}
});
}
}
I'm not sure if that's the best approach and I would be interested to see how others handle mutual exclusion in javascript, but as far as i'm aware that's a simple mutex and it is handy.

JavaScript is single threaded... though Chrome may be a new beast (I think it is also single threaded, but each tab has it's own JavaScript thread... I haven't looked into it in detail, so don't quote me there).
However, one thing you DO need to worry about is how your JavaScript will handle multiple ajax requests coming back in not the same order you send them. So, all you really need to worry about is make sure your ajax calls are handled in a way that they won't step on eachother's feet if the results come back in a different order than you sent them.
This goes for timeouts too...
When JavaScript grows multithreading, then maybe worry about mutexes and the like....

JavaScript, the language, can be as multithreaded as you want, but browser embeddings of the javascript engine only runs one callback (onload, onfocus, <script>, etc...) at a time (per tab, presumably). William's suggestion of using a Mutex for changes between registering and receiving a callback should not be taken too literally because of this, as you wouldn't want to block in the intervening callback since the callback that will unlock it will be blocked behind the current callback! (Wow, English sucks for talking about threading.) In this case, you probably want to do something along the lines of redispatching the current event if a flag is set, either literally or with the likes of setTimeout().
If you are using a different embedding of JS, and that executes multiple threads at once, it can get a bit more dicey, but due to the way JS can use callbacks so easily and locks objects on property access explicit locking is not nearly as necessary. However, I would be surprised if an embedding designed for general code (eg, game scripting) that used multi threading didn't also give some explicit locking primitives as well.
Sorry for the wall of text!

Events are signaled, but JavaScript execution is still single-threaded.
My understanding is that when event is signaled the engine stops what it is executing at the moment to run event handler. After the handler is finished, script execution is resumed. If event handler changed some shared variables then resumed code will see these changes appearing "out of the blue".
If you want to "protect" shared data, simple boolean flag should be sufficient.