Browser client

Getting started

The first step in getting started with any piece of software is installation, but “installation” is a misnomer when developing web applications. Browsers use JavaScript (JS) as their “native” programming language, but JS programs are never truly installed because they cannot alter or extend the browsers themselves. Instead, JS programs are downloaded according to the contents of webpages, and they run in “disposable” sandboxed environments that exist only while the webpages are open. Thus, the “installation” of QM’s browser client into a webpage is as simple as adding a single line of HTML:

<script src="https://www.qmachine.org/qm.js"></script>

When the webpage loads, its JS environment will contain a QM object that will allow other programs to submit jobs to and volunteer to execute jobs from the official QM servers – for free!

Note

Modern web browsers can often be programmed “externally” to the webpages themselves. For example, browsers may load custom user scripts, or they may be scripted by external programs to run unit tests. These capabilities are not leveraged in any way by the QM browser client. It may or may not run correctly within Web Worker contexts, but the client described in this manual expects to run within the “ordinary” webpage context of a modern web browser, unassisted by applets, extensions, plugins, etc.

For the hardcore software engineers out there, QM’s browser client is available for “installation” with Bower:

$ bower install qm

Basic use

Using volunteers’ machines

Two convenience functions, QM.start and QM.stop, are provided in order to control a simple non-blocking (asynchronous) event loop externally. The loop “fires” approximately once per second, and if appropriate, it runs the QM.volunteer function. This internal event loop is neither externally configurable nor necessary for using QM – it simply wraps the QM.volunteer function for convenience, rather than forcing application code to implement its own non-blocking loop.

Advanced use

QM’s browser client leverages asynchronous variables (“avars”) extensively to manage concurrency issues in an object-oriented way, and this programming model is provided by Quanah and its JavaScript library. Tutorials for advanced use are forthcoming, but they will essentially discuss working with avars. For now, the best reference on Quanah is its manual.