Development

Find best practices for using the EdgeWorkers service to enhance your website functionality.

As a developer, your goal is to solve problems and improve your website. In the design phase, there are several things to take into consideration. This section includes details about the functions, events, and objects required to write EdgeWorkers code to manipulate HTTP requests and responses.

Specifications

The EdgeWorkers service is built on V8 and supports various ECMAScript language features implemented by the V8 JavaScript engine. APIs commonly used by web developers, that are not part of the language specification itself, are not provided by EdgeWorkers.

The following are examples of common APIs not provided by EdgeWorkers: DOM APIs, Network request APIs such as XMLHttpRequest, and the Fetch API.

JavaScript Language Feature Modifications

Review the table below for information about updates to the JavaScript runtime security.

Feature Modification Description
SharedArrayBuffer removed Sets the V8 Flag --no-harmony-SharedArrayBuffer. Prevents features such as SharedArrayBuffer and Atomics from being used in the API.
Code Generation removed Disables code generation from strings. Prevents features such as new Function () and eval from being used in the API.
System Time modified Prevents time from incrementing during an event handler in the JavaScript API. Features such as Date.now() return the start time of the callback execution.
WebAssembly removed Sets the V8 Flag --no-expose-wasm. Prevents features such as WebAssembly from being used in the API.

Considerations

The EdgeWorker service compiles scripts as an ECMAScript 6 module. When using an ECMAScript 6 module you must enable strict mode and export the Event handler functions.

Different event handlers may be executed in different instances of the JavaScript Engine. As a result, writes to global JavaScript variables within event handlers are not reliably preserved across separate event handler executions.

TypeScript Support

An official TypeScript binding is available for the EdgeWorkers API. TypeScript supports features to help write, maintain, and refactor your JavaScript code including:
  • autocomplete functions for the EdgeWorkers JavaScript object model
  • lint code analysis
  • a TypeScript compiler to find problems before activating your EdgeWorker version

For more information about TypeScript go to: https://www.typescriptlang.org/.

Enter this command to install the DefinitelyTyped definition for the EdgeWorker API inside an existing TypeScript project: 
$ npm install @types/akamai-edgeworkers
The node_packages/@types/akamai-edgeworkers directory contains the type bindings. Set your tsconfig.json to use es6 as the compilation target and module code generator: 
 {
    "compilerOptions": {
        "module": "es6",
        "target": "es6",
        //...
    }
}