Current Mechanisms for Handling Asynchronous Operations
Explore common mechanisms for handling asynchronous operations in JavaScript such as callbacks promises and event emitters. Understand their limitations including callback hell loss of error handling clarity and event side effects. Gain insights into why reactive programming with RxJS is a better approach for managing asynchronous flow in modern applications.
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New world, old methods
In recent years JavaScript has become the most ubiquitous language in the world and, now, it powers the mission-critical infrastructure of businesses such as Walmart and Netflix, mobile operating systems like Firefox OS, and complex popular applications like Google Docs.
And yet we’re still using good old imperative-style programming to deal with problems that are essentially asynchronous. This is very challenging.
Note: Imperative-style programming is a style where we try to specify all the details of how we achieved a particular result in a program.
JavaScript developers see the language’s lack of threads as a feature, and we usually write asynchronous code using callbacks, promises, and events. However, as we keep adding more concurrency to our applications, the code used to coordinate asynchronous flows becomes unwieldy. The mechanisms that are currently in use all have serious shortcomings that hinder the developer’s productivity and result in ...