JavaScript: The Good Parts

Callbacks

Functions can make it easier to deal with discontinuous events. For example, suppose there is a sequence that begins with a user interaction, making a request of the server, and finally displaying the server's response. The naïve way to write that would be:

request = prepare_the_request(  );
response = send_request_synchronously(request);
display(response);

The problem with this approach is that a synchronous request over the network will leave the client in a frozen state. If either the network or the server is slow, the degradation in responsiveness will be unacceptable.

A better approach is to make an asynchronous request, providing a callback function that will be invoked when the server's response is received. An asynchronous function returns immediately, so the client isn't blocked:

request = prepare_the_request(  );
send_request_asynchronously(request, function (response) {
    display(response);
    });

We pass a function parameter to the send_request_asynchronously function that will be called when the response is available.