WebContainers

We try to keep up with the development of JS and new ways to use it, and we want to share a fairly new and interesting approach to web application development – WebContainers. 

This is an opportunity to create an environment for executing NodeJS code in a browser. WebContainers are built on the basis of Service Workers, Web Workers, WebAssembly, SharedArrayBuffers technologies and can be perceived as a virtual operating system directly in your browser tab. WebContainers has a file system, multithreading, built-in NodeJS, and its own package manager. The technology is still quite new and does not have many use cases, but it can be used to create sandboxes (CodePen, CodeSandbox), interactive training applications, documentation examples that can be launched immediately in the browser and even run a browser-side web server, which can potentially replace a virtual cloud machine and reduce costs. 

We believe that this technology will spread and in the future we will see server technologies migrating to the browser.