Hey, congratulations! Definitely going to play with this this weekend.
What are my options if I build something complicated using these workers and for whatever reason I need to stop using Cloudflare? Or if I want to write something open-source that people can deploy either on Cloudflare or on-premise? Is there a reasonable way to emulate this functionality (possibly with less sandboxing) on a self-hosted web server?
> What are my options if I build something complicated using these workers and for whatever reason I need to stop using Cloudflare?
Great question. We chose to implement the W3C standard Service Workers API in part to give people some flexibility here. E.g. depending on what your Worker does and who your clients are, it might be possible to push your same Worker code to the browser as a regular Service Worker. My hope is that other services choose to implement W3C standard APIs in the future, rather than everyone doing something bespoke as they do today.
I believe there are also some Node.js-based Service Worker harnesses designed for server-side use, though admittedly I haven't tried any myself. It would be cool to see such things developed further.
What are my options if I build something complicated using these workers and for whatever reason I need to stop using Cloudflare? Or if I want to write something open-source that people can deploy either on Cloudflare or on-premise? Is there a reasonable way to emulate this functionality (possibly with less sandboxing) on a self-hosted web server?
Also BTW you should update https://cloudflareworkers.com to note that it's live :)