Replacing Callbacks with Promises

In a perfect world, every function that started an async task would return a Promise. Unfortunately, most JavaScript APIs (including the native functions available in all browsers and in Node.js) are callback-based, not Promise-based. In this section, we’ll see how Promises can be used with callback-based APIs.

The most straightforward way to use Promises with a callback-based API is to create a Deferred and pass its trigger function(s) as the callback argument(s). For example, with a simple async function like setTimeout, we’d pass our Deferred’s resolve method.

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​var​ timing = ​new​ $.Deferred();
​ 
setTimeout(timing.resolve, 500);

In cases where an error could occur, we’d write a callback ...

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