Async JavaScript

Dynamic Async Queuing

Most of the time, the simple methods from the last two sections are enough to solve your async dilemmas. But async.series and async.parallel have their limitations.

• The task array is static. Once you’ve called async.series or async.parallel, you can’t add or remove tasks.

• There’s also no way to ask, “How many tasks have been completed?” It’s a black box, unless you dispatch updates from the tasks themselves.

• You’re limited to either no concurrency or unlimited concurrency. That’s a pretty big deal when it comes to file I/O. If we’re operating on thousands of files, we don’t want to be inefficient by doing a series, but we’re likely to anger the OS if we try to do everything in parallel.

Async.js provides a versatile method ...