STREAMS API
The Streams API is the answer to a simple but fundamental question: How can a web application consume information in sequential chunks rather than in bulk? This capability is massively useful in two main ways:
- A block of data may not be available all at once. A perfect example of this is a response to a network request. Network payloads are delivered as a sequence of packets, and stream processing can allow an application to use network-delivered data as it becomes available rather than waiting for the full payload to finish loading.
- A block of data can be processed in small portions. Video processing, data decompression, image decoding, and JSON parsing are all examples of computation that is localized to a portion of a data block and does not require it to be in memory all at once.
The “Network Requests and Remote Resources” chapter covers how the Streams API is involved with fetch()
, but the Streams API is totally generalizable. JavaScript libraries that implement...