JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

In the context of a computer program, reactivity is the process of receiving external stimuli and propagating events. This is a rather broad definition that covers a wide variety of topics. The term is usually reserved for systems that respond in turns to sensors, schedules, and above all, problems that exist between the chair and keyboard.

The field of reactivity is carved into plots ranging from "reactive programming" to the subltly distinct "functional reactive programming", with acrage set aside for "self adjusting computation" and with neighbors like "bindings" and "operational transforms". Adherents favor everything from "continuation passing style" to "promises", or the related concepts of "deferreds" and "futures". Other problems lend themselves to "observables", "signals", or "behaviors", and everyone agrees that "streams" are a good idea, but "publishers" and "subscribers" are distinct.

A few months ago Jake Archibald wrote an article about the awesomeness of the asyncfunctions in ES7 and how we can “emulate” them using ES6’s generators, using his spawn function, which has subset of the features of co.

In this blog post we’ll take a look at standard ways of handling asynchronous calls and how we can improve the readability of our code using generators. We’ll also take a further look at the implementation of spawn, since there are few tricky moments there.