Taskorama

Taskorama is a Task/Future data type for JavaScript

Taskorama is an implementation of the Task data type. It is used to express concurrent, asynchronous and cancellable computations using functional programming constructs.

The semantics is pretty close to the ones provided by Promises but it has many subtle differencies explained in the Rationale section.

Here is an example of how you can use them :

import Task from 'taskorama'

// Let's create a Task
const myTimeoutTask = Task(function (reject, resolve) {

  // complete task succesfully after 3s
  let timer = setTimeout(resolve, 3000)

  // execute `cancel` to stop the timeout
  let cancel = () => clearTimeout(timer)

  return {cancel}
})

// Start `myTimeoutTask`
const myTimeoutExec = myTimeoutTask.fork(
  (rej) => console.log('failure:', rej),
  (res) => console.log('success:', res),
  (err) => console.error('caught error:', err)
)

// Cancel `myTimeoutTask` when you need to !
myTimeoutExec.cancel()

It's like a Promise but pure, deferrable and cancellable 🤗

Install

> npm install --save taskorama

or

> yarn add taskorama

or CDN

https://unpkg.com/taskorama

Usage

The full API docs is available here : Taskorama Docs

Creating a Task

const task = Task((resolve, reject) => {
  // Do your thing ...
  resolve(the_result)

  // An error ?
  reject(the_error)

  // A closure that cancels stuff running in the task
  const cancel = () => console.log('cancelled !')

  // return it inside an object
  return {cancel}
})

Running (forking) and cancelling a Task

// the failure handler
const failureEffect = (err) => {}

// the success handler
const successEffect = (res) => {}

// the error handler (optional)
const errorEffect = (res) => {}

// Let's start the task
const runningTask = task.fork(
  failureEffect,
  successEffect,
  errorEffect
)

// Let's cancel it
runningTask.cancel() // --> 'cancelled !'

Rationale

I created this lib when I tried to implement Tasks in JavaScript in order to understand how do they work.

I like using Promises but they have major design flaws IMHO :

• They run as soon as the promise is declared : what if I want to defer the computation ?
• They are async by default : i.e. Promise.resolve(2) always runs on the next tick
• They are not cancellable (it's unfortunate that we can't cancel window.fetch http request when necessary)

Tasks happen to be really simple and have richer semantics than Promises :

• Tasks are pure : they do not perform any side-effect as long as they are not executed by calling .fork() .
• Tasks make a clear separation between definition and execution, while Promises mix the two. @andrestaltz explained it way better than me in this comment and this post

So I decided to replace Promises by Tasks in my code in order to separate pure data processing resulting of an async computation and side-effects.

I started this project after watching this talk about Observables.

The internals of Taskorama are similar to the one used in case explained in this video.

License

Taskorama is released under the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.