elfs | I'm all a-squee, #1: jQuery 1.5 has Promises and Futures!

Squee #1: The jQuery team has released jQuery 1.5. The list of proposed fixes for 1.5 was fairly minor: handling lists of attribute internally, the addition of require() for CommonJS compatibility, and so forth. The big fix was supposed to be the extensibility of jQuery into non-HTML realms like XML, XUL, and SVG.

So imagine my utter astonishment when I saw that 1.5 has Futures and Promises. Futures and Promises are a programming pattern for dealing with multi-core, multi-process, event-driven, asynchronous programming problems. You can now say things like "When operations A, B, and C are done, then do D," and more importantly, "If you get to D before A, B, and C are done, do E until A, B, C are done, then do D." This makes fetching data from multiple sources, showing the user something useful as the data comes in, currying the display as partial data is delivered to the application, all amazingly easy. I've been using the Futures.js library, which has a hinkey library, and upset that I can't use the Microsoft Ajax Control Library because of its license. For the jQuery people to just settle the issue by giving us a jQuery-ready Futures and Promises is a huge freakin' deal.