Overview of Asynchrony

Modern applications often need to perform complex computations or access resources through a network. Complex computations can become very long, a network resource might not be available, or the application might not scale well on the server. If the code that performs this kind of operation is running in the same thread as the caller, the thread gets blocked until all operations complete. If such a thread is the UI thread, the user interface becomes unresponsive and can no longer accept the user input until all operations have been completed. This type of approach is called synchronous because only one operation at a time is executed until all the processes are completed.

Having an unresponsive user interface is not acceptable ...

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