Question

Is there any equivalent of Java’s invokeLater() method of SwingUtilities in Javascript?

UPDATE 1

So, will setTimeout() with zero delay do exactly the same as invokeLater()?

Answer 1

1. If you want to run something asynchronously (later), try setTimeout()

2. JavaScript is single-threaded. If you want to run some time consuming (CPU-intensive) task outside of the event handler, you can do this using the technique above, however it will still consume event-handling thread (cause your UI to freeze).

It is generally a bad idea to run CPU-intensive tasks inside a browser (web workers might change this) since they share the same thread as event handlers, making them wait.

See also

• Are there any atomic javascript operations to deal with Ajax's asynchronous nature?