What’s the point of promises?

JavaScript is one of the most popular (if not the most) programming languages in the world. I have learned JavaScript basics in the past which included all about values, types, and operators, the program structure, functions, Data Structures i.e. Objects, and Arrays, Handling events and drawing on canvas. When I was first introduced to Asynchronous Programming which is a topic in advanced javascript, I couldn't understand the concepts of callbacks and promises.

For a long time, asynchronous, event-driven callbacks were an unavoidable part of JS development.

Traditional callback

To solve the issue with callbacks, a new concept, “Promises” were added to JS. Promises allow you to write asynchronous logic while avoiding the nesting issues that previously plagued callback-based code.

What is a Promise?

A Promise is a proxy for a value not necessarily known when the promise is created. It allows you to associate handlers with an asynchronous action’s eventual success value or failure reason. This lets asynchronous methods return values like synchronous methods: instead of immediately returning the final value, the asynchronous method returns a promise to supply the value at some point in the future.

A Promise is in one of these states:

• ⏳ pending: initial state, neither fulfilled nor rejected.
• ✅ fulfilled: meaning that the operation was completed successfully.
• ❌ rejected: meaning that the operation failed.

Promises

The biggest advantage of Promises over callbacks is readability and chain ability.

While Promises are great, they still left something to be desired. At the end of the day, writing Promises still didn’t feel “native”. To remedy this, the ECMAScript committee decided to add a new method of utilizing promises, async, and await:

async and await

The one caveat being, anything you await must have been declared async:

required definition of makeHttpRequest in prev example

It’s also possible to await a Promise directly since an async function is really just a fancy Promise wrapper. This also means the async/await code and the Promise code, are functionally equivalent.

Conclusion

No conclusion, just use the modern feature of javaScript for your own good. And as always, feel free to reach out to me! 😊