The other day at work we needed to re-think the way we were handling asynchronous tasks. In essence, we needed a way to (cleanly!) ensure one task was complete before moving on to the next. Very casually, my boss suggested we implement a ‘Promise’ pattern. Feeling a bit like a fool for having no idea what he meant, I did a bit of Googling and discovered in Actionscript land it’s a very rare concept, so I thought I’d take a bit of time and write about it (mainly to better understand it myself). Before diving into what promises are, though, I’ll take a look at the problem they solve. What it boils down to is handling asynchronous tasks (such as asset loading, for example) in a clean, intelligent fashion. In the world of Flash and Actionscript, you’ll typically find two strategies for this type of behavior: a ‘bulk loading’ approach, and an ‘event chaining’ approach. In bulk loading, you’ll usually see a BulkLoader object which gets passed tasks (asset loading tasks typically). It’s usually left up to the BulkLoader to sort out the types of tasks (is it loading an xml file or a png file) and to keep track […]
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