ralphtheninja

This article has been given a more permanent home on my blog. Also, since it was first written, the development of the Promises/A+ specification has made the original emphasis on Promises/A seem somewhat outdated.

You're Missing the Point of Promises

Promises are a software abstraction that makes working with asynchronous operations much more pleasant. In the most basic definition, your code will move from continuation-passing style:

getTweetsFor("domenic", function (err, results) {
 // the rest of your code goes here.

Put a closure on it

Sometimes you'll have objects that manage state along with event handling. This happens frequently in MVC apps. Let's start with a messy example:

var Launcher = function(rocket) {
  this.rocket = rocket
}

Launcher.prototype.isReady = function() {

Writing node modules with voxel.js

This is a short guide that will teach you the workflows that have been figured out by the voxel.js community for writing node modules + sharing them on NPM and Github. It is assumed that you have a basic understanding of JavaScript, github and the command line (if not you can check out an introduction to git and the command line or learn JS basics from JavaScript for Cats)

	# Hello, and welcome to makefile basics.
	#
	# You will learn why `make` is so great, and why, despite its "weird" syntax,
	# it is actually a highly expressive, efficient, and powerful way to build
	# programs.
	#
	# Once you're done here, go to
	# http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html
	# to learn SOOOO much more.

	# Hello, and welcome to makefile basics.
	#
	# You will learn why `make` is so great, and why, despite its "weird" syntax,
	# it is actually a highly expressive, efficient, and powerful way to build
	# programs.
	#
	# Once you're done here, go to
	# http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html
	# to learn SOOOO much more.

	import tweepy
	import time
	import re
	import pycoin.encoding
	import pickle

	# Removed security tokens from gist, replaced with XXX.
	auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler("XXX", "XXX")
	auth.set_access_token('XXX', 'XXX')

	// Copyright © 2013 Darach Ennis. All rights reserved.
	//
	// Sample EEP/Beam AR drone integration.
	// Works with keyboard
	// Works with a makey makey - http://www.makeymakey.com/
	// Coded during NodeConf EU but not demonstrated or tested ...
	//
	// Enjoy!
	//

	// data comes from here http://stat-computing.org/dataexpo/2009/the-data.html
	// download 1994.csv.bz2 and unpack by running: cat 1994.csv.bz2 \| bzip2 -d > 1994.csv
	// 1994.csv should be ~5.2 million lines and 500MB
	// importing all rows into leveldb took ~50 seconds on my machine

	// there are two main techniques at work here:
	// 1: never create JS objects, leave the data as binary the entire time (binary-split does this)
	// 2: group lines into 16 MB batches, to take advantage of leveldbs batch API (byte-stream does this)

	var level = require('level')

	sudo apt-get update
	sudo apt-get install -y git-core build-essential libssl-dev libboost-all-dev libdb5.1-dev libdb5.1++-dev libgtk2.0-dev

	git clone https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.git
	cd bitcoin/src

	make -f makefile.unix clean; make -f makefile.unix USE_UPNP= bitcoind

	installall('levelup', __dirname, function (err, paths) {
	if (err) throw err;
	console.log(paths);
	});

	/*
	{
	"0.7.0": "/levelup/0.7.0",
	"0.6.0": "/levelup/0.6.0"
	}

ralphtheninja

You're Missing the Point of Promises

Put a closure on it

Writing node modules with voxel.js

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