[MatthewPhillips]

You have to think about async code differently than you think about synchronous code. In PHP you might write:

  $data = getData();

And people want to substitute the return for a callback in js.

  getData(function(data) {
    // Do something with data.
  });

That indeed does lead to callback mess. But when you are coding in js you rarely should use anonymous functions. I mostly just use them when I might want to perform recursion. Going back to my example, I would write the operation as an object like so:

  var SomeObject = {
    start: function() {
      getData(dataGot);
    },

    dataGot: function(data) {
      
    }
  };

JavaScript is an object-oriented languages; use objects! They make async painless.

[bphogan]

Wrapping things in objects doesn't seem to help me.

I'd still end up with this, thanks to callbacks.

    app.get('/documents', function(req, res) {
      Document.find().all(function(documents) {
        // 'documents' will contain all of the documents returned by the query
        res.send(documents.map(function(d) {
          // Return a useful representation of the object that res.send() can send as JSON
          return d.__doc;
        }));
      });
    });

Seems to me that what's missing is something that lets me write it in a more simple way. What I have here looks like an absolute nightmare of coupling. So if you have some suggestions you could point me to that show a little more detail, I'd be really grateful.

[MatthewPhillips]

I would create a DocumentRequest object that takes your req and res, then break apart your callbacks to separate functions on the DocumentRequest prototype. Then you would simply consume it with:

  app.get('/documents', new DocumentRequest);

[bphogan]

Thanks for this. Been thinking about this. Could you recommend a book on patterns like these?

[tomp]

> JavaScript is an object-oriented languages; use objects! They make async painless.

In the example above, you're unable to use ''this'' in the ''dataGot'' function (when invoked as a callback).

Object orientedness is very easy to get wrong in JavaScript, if you're coming from C++/Java/Python background.

[MatthewPhillips]

Right, I excluded the bind for the sake of simplicity.

I also forgot that it's this.dataGot. dataGot doesn't exist in that context :)