The Browser as a Platform for Heavyweight Applications
summary
Coverage of using modern browser technologies—WebAssembly, WebGL, multithreading (web workers), and GPU compute—for building heavy-duty web apps that handle chemical datasets with tens or hundreds of thousands of molecules. Describes a JS/TS application architecture, practical optimizations the authors tried, which solutions worked or didn’t, and expectations for near-future capabilities.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:06Project overview
- 2:30Drug analysis needs
- 6:00Architecture issues
- 8:51Data filtering
- 12:49Columnar databases & proxies
- 15:21Graph visualization problems
- 19:40Rendering graphs with WebGL
- 23:57Browser compatibility
- 26:51WebAssembly for calculations
- 30:06WebAssembly challenges
- 34:10Multithreading
- 37:21Fixing slowdowns
- 41:26Summary
- 43:10Resources
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