Learning Node

Chapter 5. Control Flow, Asynchronous Patterns, and Exception Handling

Node might seem intimidating at times, with discussions about asynchronous events and callbacks and new objects such as EventEmitter—not to mention all that new server-side functionality we have to play with. If you’ve worked with any of the modern JavaScript libraries, though, you’ve experienced much of the functionality that goes into Node, at least when it comes to asynchronous development.

For instance, if you’ve used a timer in JavaScript, you’ve used an asynchronous function. If you’ve ever developed in Ajax, you’ve used an asynchronous function. Even the plain old onclick event handler is an asynchronous function, since we never know when the user is going to click that mouse or tap that keyboard.

Any method that doesn’t block the control thread while waiting for some event or result is an asynchronous function. When it comes to the onclick handling, the application doesn’t block all other application processing, waiting for that user’s mouse click—just as it doesn’t block all functionality while the timer is in effect, or while waiting for the server to return from an Ajax call.

In this chapter, we’re going to look more closely at exactly what we mean by the term asynchronous control. In particular, we’re going to look at some asynchronous design patterns, as well as explore some of the Node modules that provide finer control over program flow when we’re working in this new ...