Javascript callbacks - cannot live with them cannot live without them... or can you?

· March 6, 2014

This is a confession post. Yes, I’m a phony too. I pick up some things very late. Like JavaScript. And Node and … well a lot of things.

But I’m sure that a lot of people have run into this and maybe, just maybe, there will be some others that haven’t run into it yet. So this might help someone. Or me, for that matter, when I come back to this problem later.

It has to do with callbacks. The things that Node is made up of. And how they confused me a lot. And how I grew to love them, then hate them, and finally get them. And right about that point realize that there’s another way.

Let’s see if I can explain this. Just as an experiment.

Everything in node is event-driven (as from their mission statement on the homepage) and non-blocking. Which means that you see a lot of code like this in Node:

One time when this really shines in testing with Mocha for example. Here’s a bit of Mocha for you:

Let’s talk through this (only focus on the testingConfig.js file in this case):

Line 3 starts the describe-function. This function takes a string and a callback function.

  • Mocha will call all the describe-functions in your file one by one, and when it does that it will fire the anonymous function (line 4-9).

Line 4 calls the it-function. Which takes a string (description) and a callback function.

  • For each describe-function Mocha will call the it-functions in it and the anonymous function we have created on line 5-7.
  • Note the parameter to this callback function (done())

The it-function contains our assertions and is then finished by calling done()

  • The done-function is used to signal the end of our test. More about that later.

How not to Node

Now to the problem that I’ve run into more times than I care think about. Let’s say that I want to return something from my function. Like this API that I started out doing a couple of days back:

var post = getPostById(id);

Now that’s just wrong. It’s not the Node way and you’ll get into trouble if you try to pursue that path. So let’s do that and see what happens. In my case I used Mongoose to access the database, hence building a data access layer. But since everything (!) in Node is non-blocking you’ll likely run into similar problems no matter what you try. Ok so I wrote this code in my method:

But I ended up returning undefined. Every time. I couldn’t understand why. This is my understanding of it:

  • When I call Post.find() I supply an anonymous function
  • This function is called asynchronously by Mongoose when the data is returned from the database
  • Which bascially means that on line 5-15 I’m just declaring what is going to happen when we execute the query. It’s not executed right away.
  • So the code after the anonymous function (line 5-15) can be executed before the anonymous code. Or not.
  • Which means that there’s no value to return when we get to line 18.

The idea of waiting (with a thread.sleep() equivalent) just made me smiled. In a tiered way. There’s something wrong here.

How to Node

That’s not how you should do it. It’s wrong on the API level already. Instead it looks something like this:

> style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">getPostById(id, > callback);
With this implementation: This is basically just pushing the problem upwards, if you like. You're caller will also supply a callback and you call that. It's nice and clean, and also allows for Node to continue to operate in a non-blocking way.
But... where does it end? Someone need to hold on to the whole chain and wait for all the callbacks to execute? At this point my mind was spinning. Let's see what happens when someone tries to use this. First a test:
When can see that we're nesting the callbacks and in the innermost callback we'll call out to done(); That function had me wondering when i started to do mocha testing. But now I understand. It will wait there until all the callbacks has completed. From the Mocha documentation: > By adding a callback (usually named done) to it() Mocha will know that > it should wait for completion. Ok, that was testing. But in the real deal world then. This is how we ended up using it with sockets in Node. src="https://gist.github.com/marcusoftnet/9366464.js"\> Sockets is the sockets from Node and hence is non-blocking. So the socket.on() takes a string and a function. This function is called when someone calls the socket with the string ("post" in our example). We then call the createPost method that takes a ... callback, you guessed it. And it calls into the data access layer which takes callbacks and ... Finally all the callbacks has returned (and Node has done other things in the background which leads to it's awesome scalabilities) and we're back up in createPost-anonymous callback block. We call broadcast an emit with "postAdded" and the post that was returned and we're done handling the callback block for socket.on("post") Yeah, I needed some oxygen to when I tried to follow that. This is cool and everything, but there must be a easier way. Now doesn't it? ### How to promise instead Promises! The mirage in the callback-desert. The wonderful sunrise that brings tears in the eyes of every Javascript developers. The thing that I don't use and haven't understood yet. Not completely at least. But I can show you this from the promise library Q's site: I cannot, sadly, explain what's going on there fully. But I can see that it's better, easier and clearer. That's enough for me to want to dive in and try to learn it. Promise (pun intended) to get back to you on that.

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