when.js

When.js is a rock solid, battle-tested Promises/A+ and when() implementation, including a complete ES6 Promise shim. It's a powerful combination of small size, high performance, debuggability, and rich features:

• Resolve arrays and hashes of promises, as well as infinite promise sequences
• Execute tasks in parallel or sequentially
• Transform Node-style and other callback-based APIs into promise-based APIs

When.js is one of the many stand-alone components of cujoJS, the JavaScript Architectural Toolkit.

Check it out:

• What's new
• API docs
• Read more about how promises simplify async programming

Installation

AMD

Available as when through bower, or just clone the repo and load when.js from the root.

bower install --save when

CommonJS/Node

npm install --save when

More help & other environments »

Usage

Promises can be used to help manage complex and/or nested callback flows in a simple manner. To get a better handle on how promise flows look and how they can be helpful, there are a couple examples below (using commonjs).

This first example will print "hello world!!!!" if all went well, or "drat!" if there was a problem. It also uses rest to make an ajax request to a (fictional) external service.

var rest = require('rest');
 
fetchRemoteGreeting()
    .then(addExclamation)
    .catch(handleError)
    .done(function(greeting) {
        console.log(greeting);
    });
 
function fetchRemoteGreeting() {
    // returns a when.js promise for 'hello world'
    return rest('http://example.com/greeting');
}
 
function addExclamation(greeting) {
    return greeting + '!!!!'
}
 
function handleError(e) {
    return 'drat!';
}

The second example shows off the power that comes with when's promise logic. Here, we get an array of numbers from a remote source and reduce them. The example will print 150 if all went well, and if there was a problem will print a full stack trace.

var when = require('when');
var rest = require('rest');
 
when.reduce(when.map(getRemoteNumberList(), times10), sum)
    .done(function(result) {
        console.log(result);
    });
 
function getRemoteNumberList() {
    // Get a remote array [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
    return rest('http://example.com/numbers').then(JSON.parse);
}
 
function sum(x, y) { return x + y; }
function times10(x) {return x * 10; }

License

Licensed under MIT. Full license here »

Contributing

Please see the contributing guide for more information on running tests, opening issues, and contributing code to the project.

References

Much of this code was inspired by the async innards of wire.js, and has been influenced by the great work in Q, Dojo's Deferred, and uber.js.