Harmony - proxies | asynchronous

[Juan Ignacio Dopazo]

There is already a Node module that uses Proxies as a way of enforcing
promises:

https://github.com/sam-mccall/node-plate

It allows your to write:

var pfs = plate(fs);
pfs.writeFile('/etc/passwd.bak', pfs.readFile('/etc/passwd'));
pfs.end(function(err) { if(err) throw err; console.log("It's saved"); });

Juan

On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 12:02 PM, Xavier MONTILLET
<xavierm02.net at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm just a lambda JavaScript programmer who loves building black boxes
> with the smallest APIs possible and a couple of hours ago, I found out
> Proxys existed and since then, I've been watching talks and reading
> articles about them. And it sure looks awesome.
>
> But there's one thing I didn't get:
> Will we be able to use them to provide an API for remote objects?
>
> Because it looks it it can but it lacks the asynchronous aspect.
> This guys says it will:
>
> http://code.google.com/p/es-lab/wiki/Talks#Changes_to_ECMAScript,_Part_2:_Harmony_Highlights_-_proxies_and
> But when I look at the draf (
>
> http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:proxies#an_eventual_reference_proxy
> ), the only sentence I see "asynchronous" in is this one:
> "This example shows how to implement a proxy that represents an
> eventual reference, enforcing asynchronous property access on an
> object."
>
> And in the code below, the only thing that might do something
> asynchronous is this:
>
> get: function(receiver, name) {
>     return promiseFor(function(){return obj[name];});
>   },
>
> And it sounds more like it returns some value and *then* gets the real one.
> And this promiseFor function appears nowhere else on the page...
>
> And if it can not be asynchronous, it (probably) can't be used in
> Node.JS which, apart from the browser, will more likely become one of
> the most used JavaScript environment.
> But the thing is that if you provide both a synchronous and an
> asynchronous APIs, it might become a big mess...
> The the best solution seems to be to provide only an asynchronous API
> with a callback given as argument to get, set, has, hasOwn and so on.
>
> But then is gets quite strange because you do:
>
> var value = proxy.property;
>
> and it does
>
> var value = handler.get( proxy, 'property' );
>
> but if get is asynchronous this can not work...
> Or then it has to be some strange C++ code and we loose all the
> interest of having asynchronous requests in the first place.
>
> Thank you in advance for your potential future response.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>
> To put it in a nutshell: Will Proxys support asynchronous requests?
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>
> If my question is dumb and / or pointless, I'm sorry for wasting your time.
> _______________________________________________
> es-discuss mailing list
> es-discuss at mozilla.org
> https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/attachments/20110902/9486ae8a/attachment.html>