Using asynchronous actions

There are plenty of use cases for implementing synchronous actions within an application. At some point, those synchronous actions will not be able to scale out should the load on the application increase. This is where asynchronous actions come in. These actions allow many executions to be made using different contexts, whereas synchronous actions will block other actions from executing until the invoked action is complete. This ability to execute without the need to wait for a response allows large-scale message sending without any concern of thread-blocking, which can lead to longer wait times and less than desirable performance.

The notion of asynchronous actions has been a paradigm in programming for many years. Using callback functions, which are meant to be executed when one method has completed and returned a value, has been a construct in JavaScript, as well as other languages. Specific patterns such as asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) were...