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Javascript Unlocked

You're reading from   Javascript Unlocked Improve your code maintainability, performance, and security through practical expert insights and unlock the full potential of JavaScript

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Product type Paperback
Published in Dec 2015
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781785881572
Length 182 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Toc

Table of Contents (10) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Diving into the JavaScript Core FREE CHAPTER 2. Modular Programming with JavaScript 3. DOM Scripting and AJAX 4. HTML5 APIs 5. Asynchronous JavaScript 6. A Large-Scale JavaScript Application Architecture 7. JavaScript Beyond the Browser 8. Debugging and Profiling Index

Error-first Callback

The pattern used across all the asynchronous methods in Node.js is called Error-first Callback. Here is an example:

fs.readFile( "foo.txt", function ( err, data ) {
  if ( err ) {
    console.error( err );
  }
  console.log( data );
});

Any asynchronous method expects one of the arguments to be a callback. The full callback argument list depends on the caller method, but the first argument is always an error object or null. When we go for the asynchronous method, an exception thrown during function execution cannot be detected in a try/catch statement. The event happens after the JavaScript engine leaves the try block. In the preceding example, if any exception is thrown during the reading of the file, it lands on the callback function as the first and mandatory parameter. Regardless of its widespread use, this approach has its flaws. While writing real code with deep callback sequences, it is easy to run into a so-called Callback Hell (http://callbackhell...

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