Are Jquery Fadein(), Animation() Functions Non-blocking?

I have a page which issues several ajax queries in $('document').ready(). I want to use fadeIn() or animation() to display some information for a few seconds after received the fir

Solution 1:

Yes, they are non-blocking. The animation methods just initiate the animation and returns immediately.

Any code that updates the user interface has to be non-blocking, as the user interface isn't updated while any function is running.

Solution 2:

All javascript can be considered blocking because it is entirely single threaded.

You can't do something like:

fadeIn
sleep(5 seconds)
fadeOut

without causing incoming ajax responses to be queued until the fadeOut has returned. Using setTimeout is probably the best thing to do.

EDIT: As @Guffa pointed out, the actual calls to fadeIn and fadeOut are not, themselves, blocking calls. What you probably want is something like:

fadeIn(time, function() {
    setTimeout("fadeOut()", 5000);
});

or words to that effect.