Asynchrony with Promises in SaxonJS
One of the main developments for the next major release of SaxonJS is a redesign of the mechanisms for asynchronous processing from XSLT. The new conceptual design, and implementation, is closely aligned with JavaScript promises, making it more accessible to users familiar with the JavaScript processing model. A new extension instruction ixsl:promise can be used in the place of the existing instruction ixsl:schedule-action to initiate an asynchronous process, and specify its handling on completion or failure. A number of new extension functions are provided to create promises (e.g. for asynchronous resource fetches and HTTP requests), and to enable these to be chained and processed concurrently. In this presentation we will provide an introduction to IXSL promises with examples and demonstrations in anticipation of the release of SaxonJS 3.
Debbie Lockett joined Saxonica back in early 2014 in the days of Saxon 9.6; when XPath 3.0 and XQuery 3.0 were brand new, and XSLT 3.0 was approaching "last call working draft" status. She had no idea what any of these things meant, and has learned everything she knows about software development and XML technologies while at Saxonica. Debbie previously worked as a post-doctoral researcher in Mathematics at the University of Leeds, writing papers on symmetries of infinite relational structures. Debbie has worked on SaxonJS since its inception in 2016, and is now a lead developer.