NW.js

NW.js v0.18.4 Released with Node.js working in Web Workers

2016/10/31

We are happy to announce NW.js 0.18.4 with Node.js working in Web Workers.

To enable this feature, use command line argument --enable-node-worker. One of the best things about it is that you can offload CPU hogging tasks with new threads, while exchange large amount of data with DOM efficiently with the structured clone algorithm.

Starting from day 1 of our mission, we want to provide JavaScript programmers capabilities of writing native applications as C/C++ programmers can do. Besides the source code protection feature, writing multi-threaded applications is one of them, to utilize modern multi-core CPUs and keep your application responsive. Read the guide on Web Workers and you can just use Node within it.

Please note that binary modules of Node.js need to be thread-safe to be used in this way. We've made modifications to Node.js core to make sure core APIs are thread-safe, while we can not promise this with 3rd party binary modules. Pure JS modules are thread safe as long as they depends on thread-safe modules only. And there shouldn't be any side effect when the feature is not turned on.

For more information on the new milestone 0.13 and later versions, please see our blog "What's New in 0.13" for a better introduction.

ChangeLog

Full changelog: https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/blob/nw18/CHANGELOG.md

Download

SDK build:

Binaries for other platforms: https://dl.nwjs.io/v0.18.4/

There are 2 builds for each platform - normal build, and SDK build. Normal build doesn't have devtools, only SDK build does. lt can be opened by pressing F12 (Cmd-Alt-I on OSX). SDK packages also have more development tools to be exposed in the following releases, as well as the NaCl support.

Our build infrastructure enables live binary build from git tip so you can access to the latest binary from https://dl.nwjs.io/live-build/

Known issues

http://docs.nwjs.io/en/latest/For%20Users/Migration/From%200.12%20to%200.13/#known-issues

Discussion

See our mailing list to discuss on this release: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/nwjs-general/jljGxjIyxK4/pVqyidTrBAAJ