[VeejayRampay]

Web Workers are a good example of those new technologies that the HTML5 Javascript APIs expose to programmers that we don't really have found a real-life use for as of now...

Just like WebSockets really, you can feel the obvious potential but I have yet to encounter a good example of how Web Workers will help the average web developer to solve his problems in a more efficient or elegant manner.

The fact that they can't manipulate the DOM in a simple way is probably one of the reasons why they haven't crossed the mainstream line. That or the still approximative support across browsers.

Or maybe it's just that they're too much of a game changer and we've yet to wrap our heads around their power. I don't know...

[jwoah12]

My side project[1] is an interactive table component that allows the user to provide the table data through an arbitrary callback. I allow the use to either pass an actual function or a reference to inline code that will be instantiated as a web worker. I figure there may be a case in which the user is creating the dataset in some expensive way, but it can happen in a separate thread and not tie up the UI. Then the worker passes the final data back to the UI thread to render. It would make sense that any intensive calculations should happen on the server, but I wanted to leave the option open.

[1] - http://jarwol.com/aTable/