jQuery asynchronous function call, no AJAX request

Question

This seems silly, but I can\'t find how to do an asynchronous function call with jQuery that doesn\'t involve some server-side request. I have a slow function that iterates

Answer 1

Javascript runs in a single thread and therefore if you have a slow function it will block everything else.

UPDATE

That will do some of what you want, but keep in mind that they are not widely supported supported in IE (I think they will be in IE10).

Some resources on Web Workers:

• Using Web workers
• Wikipedia article on Web Workers
• WHATWG: Web Workers

Here are a few resources on accomplishing multi-threading without web workers. It's important to note that this isn't "true" multi-threading:

• Multi-threading in Javascript (title is a little misleading; it's not true multi-threading)
• Why doesn't Javascript support multi-threading?
• Is there some way to do multi-threading in Javascript?
• Simulating multi-threading using IFRAMEs (I'm not sure how viable this method is; it might be more trouble than it's worth and the law of diminishing returns probably applies.)