My JavaScript book is out! Don't miss the opportunity to upgrade your beginner or average dev skills.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

The JavaScript typeof Operator Problem

TL;DR don't even try to normalize or shim newer typeof via code: you simply can't!

Whenever it was a mistake or not to consider typeof null == "object", many libraries that tried to normalize this operator failed to understand that null is not the only problem.

The JS Polymorphism Nature

We can borrow methods for basically everything but primitives values, such booleans, numbers, and strings, do not accept indeed any sort of property or method attached runtime.

var s = "hello";
s.greetings = true;
alert(s.greetings);
// "undefined"

However, we can still use methods through call() or apply():

function isGreetings() {
return /^(?:ciao|hello|hi)$/.test(this);
}
alert(isGreetings.call("hello"));
// true

The only way to find a method in a primitive value is to extend its own constructor.prototype:

String.prototype.isGreetings = function () {
return /^(?:ciao|hello|hi)$/.test(this);
};
alert("hello".isGreetings());
// true


What Happens When We Invoke A Method

In ECMAScript 3 up to 5.1, when "use strict" directive is not in place, any primitive value will be temporarily converted into an object, where only null and undefined will be converted into the original global object.

alert(function () {
return this === window;
}.call(null));

// ... and here a tiny winy problem ...
alert(function () {
return this ? true : false;
}.call(false)); // true
alert(function () {
return Boolean(this);
}.call(false)); // true
alert(function () {
return !!this;
}.call(false)); // true

Back to the previous chapter, a situation like this might mislead as well:

function setAsGreetings() {
this.greetings = true;
alert(this.greetings); // true
}
var s = "hello";
setAsGreetings.call(s);
alert(s.greetings); // undefined


Why This Is A Problem

Try to imagine this really simple piece of code:

function whichType() {
return typeof this;
}
// guess what ...
alert([
whichType.call(null), // "object"
whichType.call(false), // "object"
whichType.call(true), // "object"
whichType.call("hello"), // "object"
whichType.call(123), // "object"
whichType.call(undefined) // "object"
].join("\n"));

Now you can play adding "use strict" to the very beginning of the whichType function.
Doing the same with an argument, rather than context injection, will produce the same output, regardless the function has or not the strict directive.

function whichType(o) {
// pointless "use strict";
return typeof o;
}
// guess what ...
alert([
whichType(null), // "object"
whichType(false), // "boolean"
whichType(true), // "boolean"
whichType("hello"), // "string"
whichType(123), // "number"
whichType(undefined) // "undefined"
].join("\n"));


What If You Want Use new String/Number/Boolean

It's not only about context injection and the typeof this, it's also about the ability to use collections of the same type as we need.
As example, let's imagine we have a list of unique IDs, and we would like to flag them, relate them, or use them, as objects.

var ids = [
"a",
"b",
"c"
];

// an easy way to mirror strings as objects
var flagged = ids.map(Object);

// check if a generic input/id exists ...
var i = ids.indexOf("b");

// ... and check if it has been used/touched already
if (-1 < i && !flagged[i].touched) {
flagged[i].touched = true;
alert("touched");
}
// once again ... but it will never happen
if (-1 < i && !flagged[i].touched) {
flagged[i].touched = true;
alert("touched");
}

With above example we might use the variable ids to simply filter existent and not existent input, and mirror these ids through they respective objects and eventually reuse these objects as we need, concatenating them, recycling them, etc etc ... I know, above example is not such common use case, right? But of course it's not since we have so many problems with typeof and nobody in JS world has ever suggested to use, when necessary, these constructors in a useful way...

typeof In JS.Next

Since explicit should superset implicit behaviours, ECMAScript 6 and code under "use strict" directive will react like this.

function app(s) {"use strict";
alert(type.call(s));
}

function type() {"use strict";
return typeof this;
}

app("primitive"); // "string"
app(new String("object"));// "object"

This is actually awesome since we can always tell if that string/object has been created using new Constructor or not ... which leads with less ambiguous code and the possibility to use objects as primitives whenever we find a case were it's needed.

function setGreetings() {
this.greetings = true;
}
var s = "hello";
setGreetings.call(s); // pointless
s.greetings; // undefined

// but if we want ...

s = new String(s);
setGreetings.call(s);
s.greetings; // true !!!

As summary, knowing in advance how an object has been created, will let us understand if whatever property/method changed or attached to a generic this will make sense or not ... unless these operations are not simply used internally during the temporarily lifetime of that possible object ... where again we might need to know if we have to clean up after or not ... that's what I call control, isn't it?

... And No Polyfill Will Do

Bad news here is ... there is no way to replicate the new and correct behaviour of the next typeof operator.
If we remove "use strict" directive from the latter example's type() function, we'll notice that the result will be "object" in both cases ... no matter how we pass the original argument.

Reasonable + Inconsistent = Fail

If your only concern is that typeof null should produce the string "null", you might realize that o === null is all you need, rather than creating and calling a function every time you want/need to understand the type of an object.
As we have seen before, when null is used as context, the typeof could return "object" in any case.
When latter case happens, the check against the triple equality operator will fail as well.
If null is not the only problem, just consider that if an engineer created a variable using new String(text) rather than using just text there must be a bloody reason: either the engineer does not know JavaScript OR, most likely, decided to use the possibility offered by an object that is wrapping a primitive value.
If you use a framework that does this wrapping by default there's only one thing to do: change framework!
Strings are immutable while Objects are always freshly baked ... since a list of strings as objects cannot even use Array#indexOf unless you don't hold and/or compare via Generic#valueOf() every time the list content, the amount of pointless RAM and CPU used to work with these kind of wrappers does not scale ... full stop.
If you never use new String and believe that nobody else will as well, your logic might be screwed in any case by the fact that newer browsers might implement a proper typeof and make your code/logic weak when the original constructor has been used as wrapper.

How To Migrate, How To Not Fail

Unless both your code and your environment is frozen by respective versions, and it does not matter if it's client or server side, you cannot basically trust your own code because one day, in some browser, it might act differently.
If you need typeof so much and your code is for 3rd parties development, you might decide to create two slightly different versions of your code or simply normalize the old typeof behavior forgetting then returning "string" when you don't actually know if the developer meant string or new String.
A feature detection like this one could help:

var NEW_TYPEOF = function(){
"use strict";
return typeof this == "string";
}.call("");

To simplify above code you might trust the generic strict directive behaviour, through undefined, via this snippet:

var USE_STRICT_COMPATIBLE = function(){
"use strict";
return !this;
}();

Followed by the rarely seen check:

var USE_STRICT_ENABLED = function(){
return !this;
}();

Above check does not simply tell us if the the browser can handle the strict directive, it also tells us if we are already under use strict.
If we wrap everything in our own closure we might not care in any case ... so, back to the topic, we might understand through these checks if we are under strict directive but what we cannot normalize in any case is something like:

function borrowedMethod() {
alert(yourTypeOfShim(this));
}
borrowedMethod.call("fail");
borrowedMethod.call(new String("fail"));

In ECMAScript 3rd Edition latest snippet will return "object" while in ES5 and strict directive it will return "string".
If your normalizer is "so cool" that transform any instanceof String into "string", then you might realize that same code run under strict in ES5 will return "object" so either both ways, and as summary, your function is not reliable.
Can we say now there's more mess than before? Oh well ...

Doesn't Matter, Had Type

If you wanna have a function that will never be able to compete with the real power of ES6 or "use strict" typeof operator, you might end up with something like this:

function type(o) {"use strict";
var type = typeof o;
if (type == "object") {
if (!o)
type = "null"
; else if (
o instanceof Boolean ||
o instanceof Number ||
o instanceof String
)
type = typeof o.valueOf()
;
}
return type;
}

However, all you gonna have in this case is a function that removes a new feature from the next version of JavaScript.
I have aded this script just to give you a chance if you wanna believe that using methods across primitive wrappers does not make sense ( subclassing anybody ? at that point you gonna have another problem ... oh well, again ... )

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Dealing With Future Pointers

I have talked about this already in both JSConfEU and QCon - London and I have also blogged a couple of times about this problem that many developers keep ignoring ...

The Unexpected Input


In JSConfEU I have showed with my slides this picture:
iPad and magic mouse
which is simply the reason most of the so called mobile websites won't work as expected.
Why that? Because "ontouchend" in window, the most pointless feature detection ever, will produce a positive result and if you decide which event should be attached to the document or any DOM node relying this check, the moment the device that exposes touch events BUT has a trackpad, mouse, or any other alternative pointer device connected, it will fail, it won't work, it will look broken!

A Hybrid Solution

We could make the assumption that if the user is using fingers, the user will keep using fingers ... while if the user chooses the alternative pointer, there shouldn't be a case where fingers are again on the screen.
For this kind of situation/assumption, a lazy pointer detection is the only one we can rely.

// useless/unoptimized code - used to explain and nothing else
function initPointerEvents(e) {
// decide what should be used later on
switch (e.type) {
case "touchstart": return useTouches();
// other possible cases
default: return useMouse();
}
document.removeEventListener("touchstart", initPointerEvents, true);
document.removeEventListener("mousedown", initPointerEvents, true);
document.removeEventListener("mousemove", initPointerEvents, true);
document.removeEventListener("mousewheel", initPointerEvents, true);
}
// note the usage of true, so that we can be sure these detections are performed
// before any other listener attached with "false" ( bubbling phase )
document.addEventListener("touchstart", initPointerEvents, true);
document.addEventListener("mousedown", initPointerEvents, true);
document.addEventListener("mousemove", initPointerEvents, true);
document.addEventListener("mousewheel", initPointerEvents, true);

With above example it becomes really easy to understand what's the user choice: either touch, or keyboard.
No matter what kind of device we are dealing with, the very first event will tell us what kind/group of events we should use.

Well ... Still Not Friendly

What if the user combines touches and trackpad?
Microsoft Surface Tablet
The Microsoft Surface proposal looks great to me, but at the same time it might fail in most common mobile oriented websites.
First of all, MS has introduced kinda proprietary events to deal with pointers but I wonder how these events will behave once the user decide to switch between trackpad and screen.
I imagine that the mouse cursor will appear and disappear accordingly, at least that is what could make sense to me, so that the page could actually implement both :hover styles and still be based on touch events but the simple fact is that all this is a mess for web pages.
Here an example of how things could go wrong, assuming the classic trackpad in older laptop won't mean that msPointerEnabled is true ( being that screen not touchable )

// the MS suggested feature detection
if (window.navigator.msPointerEnabled) {
// fails when the user uses the trackpad instead of the screen
} else {
// fails when the user uses the screen instead of the trackpad
}

So, unless Windows 8 does not prefer MS events regardless the hardware, the inline feature detection will fail in this case as well.

We Need A Better Interface

This call is mainly for W3C, everything we have right now does not scale with more complex, modern, hybrid, devices.
This is also not only about mouses, trackpads, and screens, this is related to virtual keyboards too, the most annoying thing could appear and without notification/control in a webpage screen.
What we could do is to create yet another library able to deal in a totally abstract way with all these cases and in real time.
But how big this overhead would be? Think how many times we attach events to single nodes, rather than into the document only, and think how many checks we need to do in order to normalize properly and cross platform user actions.
The ideal library should be able to switch runtime and handle combination of any sort of pointer ... maybe you scroll a page with fingers, then you draw on canvas with a USB pen ... then you type on the screen, then suddenly you press enter in the keyboard ... and so on ...
Asus Transformer Prime


One Problem At The Time

There is no library out there able to truly behave as expected and switch runtime all these possibilities ... so I might decide to write one but the architecture should be both simple and able to scale.
I am not a huge fun of too abstract architectures for the simple reason that these rarely have good performances but this is a problem that later we deal with, more problems we'll have.
If you have any library I am not aware of that is that smart, please let me know and I'll update the post linking to this library.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Ranting About Racing Engines

Update ... regardless this rant is still valid ... I have updated for both Web and node my es6-collections following stricter currently available specs.


This is happening right now, or better, since this race started a while ago between alternative browsers and the idea of bringing JavaScript every-bloody-where ...

On Engines Fragmentations

This happens since ever in vehicles engines and we can all see the difference in themes of both prices and CO2 emissions. Every major car/motorbike engine manufacturer is competing against others.
N times the amount of money spent, N times the number of patents slightly different and potentially able to make better engines production slower/farer due patents lifecycle.
Almost zero joined effort ... same studies over and over with of course different solutions, and these are always welcome, but rarely a shared effort between teams able to bring the 0 emissions, ecologic and usable engine we are all dreaming about ( look at all these prototypes with batteries rather than gasoline ... look at the very first and only hybrid diesel engine, etc etc ... now ask yourself how long will it take before we can all afford these engines for real ... )

The Web Is Different ... But

Well, at least there are tons of groups trying to bring some Harmony between JavaScript engines.
I believe is still good that there are different implementations such V8, Nitro, SpiderMonkey, Chakra, Whatever ... but when it comes to the race, all these engines are adopting early versions of specs that are still under definition and this is bad 'cause ...

The Side Effect

Works only in Google Chrome is the very first side effect of this fragmentation and while earlier/faster adoption of most recent standards and drafted specs can be considered one step forward, the idea that a Web page works only in a single browser, and no matter which one is it, bring us back to year 2000 ... have we learned anything since?
Chrome Engineers are great and extremely fast, same is for all Webkit contributors, as well as SpiderMonkey and all other engines but if we find 2345678 different APIs that works inconsistently across all JavaScript engines I believe we are doing it wrong.
Here just a few examples:
  • W3C effort to bring more HW access through the Web
  • PhoneGap APIs to expose native access to JavaScript and Web Pages
  • webOS APIs to expose native access to JavaScript Apps
  • Boot 2 Gecko APIs to have HW access through JavaScript
  • ChromeOS APIs to have lower level access
  • Safari Mobile APIs not present in other mobile browsers
  • Opera and Mobile proprietary namespace ( really guys, please drop that window.opera thingy to start with ... )
  • Adobe APIs to interface Flash objects and JavaScript for Air or generic plugin content
  • newest ES6 APIs ... so cool, and so unstable at the same time ...
About latter point, I am unable to push my updated version of my es6-collections and I tell you why ...

The Curious Case Of Harmony Collections


Map, Set, and WeakMap respective prototypes are changing all the time ... oh well, this is a common side effect about adopting features that are under discussion on daily basis and not defined anywhere yet.
In any case, I would like to use the native constructor where available, and this is true for both Firefox (Aurora) and Chrome (Canary with enabled experimental features).
While updating my es6-collections code I have realized, after changing tests and implementing the desired behavior, that Aurora has a size() method that does not exist in Canary and that Map#set(key, value) does not return the value as it does in Canary.
Who is correct? Who is wrong? It doesn't actually matter because if these methods are frozen in the prototype, I cannot fix anything there and I need to create another subset with a different name in order to obtain a fixed and consistent version of these constructors across all platforms and most likely penalizing Aurora or Canary being unable to use respective native implementation ...

Why Native

Native is fast, native is good, native is the way to go and the reason we create polyfills: to be able to remove them once our current A grade target browsers support already this or that API and it works as expected and as fast as possible.
About working as expected once we deal with a native API ... I don't even want to start this conversation 'cause there are too many things to consider here ... my take on this is: don't fix browsers bugs unless it's IE that won't update automatically and only if IE is an interesting target browser for your app.
As easy as that ... if a browser vendor realize the gravity of a bug the team will fix it asap ... if we show easy work-arounds to a specific bug all over the place they won't consider that problem as a show stopper.
Even better, always file a bloody bug with proper description, a link to specs, and a use case that makes sense so that these guys can properly understand the gravity and what is this about ... OK? A bit more effort from the Web community itself about filing bugs can only bring a better Web for all of us.
In any case, if we cannot trust native behavior across platform, we need to create yet another boring library able to fix all these things for us ... and this is getting ridiculous, imho ... I don't want to re-fix the browser for every single native call I do from the JavaScript core ... I just would like to use the programming language and its native "things" and focus on something else, something more, something productive!
Today for a basic web page with a stupid form to submit, we add minimum 200Kb of fixes through any sort of "lightweight" library ... isn't it? Is this what the meaning of "JavaScript everywhere" is becoming day after day? If you don't use the library to fix native stuff you cannot do much?

Not Only JavaScript

You don't need me to tell you that the CSS world is even more messed up than JavaScript one ... and the reason is basically the same: fragmentation of rules and new features using prefixes all over the place which results in 5 times bigger CS with repeated things all over the place ... the most distunging piece of "code" ever in the Web history that ... needs to be fixed with libraries, again? meh is the maximum expression I have for this without being vulgar ...

What Can We Do

I have no idea ... and in my specific case, talking about es6-collections, I have to wait and nothing else. I have to wait in order to be sure one behavior is correct, while another one is not, and finally penalize browser A or browser B feature testing the inconsistency and throwing away native constructors in favor of shimmed one ... so that my tests, at least tests, will be consistently green across all supported engines/platforms.
Was my fault in first place to propose polyfills for something still that unstable and not properly implemented in these browsers developers channels? Probably yes, but many others are bringing few ES.Next things through libraries and polyfills so be aware that things might screw up without notice from a day to another one due automatic updates and if you don't follow all these libraries on daily basis you might find yourself in a situation where all your code needs to be rewritten ... and I guess none of us would like that much this situation ...

Shim The Spec

To avoid misunderstanding, polyfills for already official and approved specs are always welcome. This is the case of ECMAScript 5 or 5.1, as example, where things are not going to change any soon while everything related to Harmony and ES6, if the shim is even possible, should be categorized as "experimental, might not work, I knew it was going to break somewhere" ... and this is true even for what I am proposing with es6-collections: it's cool! ... and be careful, even if the shim you are using is not mine.

P.S. the current version has keys and values plus does not work with edge cases such NaN or -0 when it comes to Map keys ... the local version I have is green everywhere and implements specs properly so stay tuned if you want a closer ES6 version of these constructors API while start avoiding the usage of keys and values properties if you are using that code already ( about NaN and -0 I don't bother, I think using these values as keys is an error in any case ... however, next version will have a better indexOf to match NaN and -0 too so that specs, those we know today, will be respected, forcing the implementation to do not trust native Array#indexOf and its inconsistent result when it comes to those values that are not reflective).

Last, but not least, more than asking clarification in the ECMAScript group I could not do ... so, even filing a bug in this case is kinda pointless since I don't even know what to write there except that another engine does something different about something that's not fully defined yet: Math.pow(MEH, 31)

Friday, June 08, 2012

Asynchronous Storage For All Browsers

I have finally implemented and successfully tested the IndexedDB fallback for Firefox so that now every browser, old or new, should be able to use this interface borrowed from localStorage API but made asynchronous.

Asynchronous Key/Value Pairs

The main purpose of this asyncStorage API is to store large amount of data as string, including base64 version of images or other files.
As it is, usually, values are the bottleneck, RAM consumption speaking, while keys are rarely such big problem.
However, while keys are retrieved asynchronously and in a non-blocking way, but kept in memory, respective values are always retrieved asynchronously in order to do not fill the available amount of RAM for our Web Application.

Database Creation/Connection

Nothing more than ...

asyncStorage.create("my_db_name", function (db, numberOfItems) {
// do stuff with the asyncStorage
});


Storing An Item

As it is for localStorage, but async

asyncStorage.create("my_db_name", function (db, numberOfItems) {
db.setItem("a", "first entry", function () {
// done, item stored
});
});

Please note that if the item was there already, it's simply replaced with the new value.

Getting An Item

As it is for localStorage, but async

asyncStorage.create("my_db_name", function (db, numberOfItems) {
db.getItem("a", function (value) {
// done, value retrieved
});
});

Please note that if the item was not previously stored, the returned value will be exactly null as it is for localStorage.

Removing An Item

As it is for localStorage, but async

asyncStorage.create("my_db_name", function (db, numberOfItems) {
db.removeItem("a", function () {
// done, no key a is present anymore
// so length is decreased already here
// and db.get("a") will send a null value
});
});


Removing All Items

As it is for localStorage, but async, and considering that only values in the specified database name will be erased, rather than all of them.

asyncStorage.create("my_db_name", function (db, numberOfItems) {
db.clear(function () {
// done, database "my_db_name" is now empty
});
});


Getting All Items Keys

If this is really what you need to do, bear in mind the API is the same used in the localStorage where indeed there's no way to retrieve all keys if not doing something like:

for (var
keys = [],
i = db.length;
i--;
) {
keys[i] = db.key(i);
}


Getting All Items

Well, the thing here is that you can store an entire object through JSON so if you need to save and get back everything, it's kinda pointless to store different keys, just use one.
However, this is how I would do this task:

for (var
object = {},
complete = function () {
alert("Done, all items in the object");
},
ongetitem = function (value, key) {
object[key] = value;
if (!--j) complete();
},
i = db.length,
j = i;
i--;
) {
db.getItem(db.key(i), ongetitem);
}


On Github, Of Course

You can find full API description in this repository. Please forgive me if the name was initially db.js, I believe the new one, asyncStorage.js, is much more appropriate (also another guy created a script called db.js so ... well, I have avoided conflicts with that library).

That's Pretty Much It

And I hope you'll start using this API to avoid blocking mobile and desktop browsers when you store a lot of data ;)

Monday, June 04, 2012

Working With Queues

Programming with queues is basically what we do in any case: it does not matter if we write code in that way, we simply think in that way.
This means that our logic flow is generally distributed in tasks where "on case X" we apply "logic/procedure Y" .. isn't it?

The Good'ol GOTO

The goto statement has been historically criticized, as well as the switch one, and in both cases is about entry and exit points in a generic workflow.
Nowadays, we can say the GOTO is not needed anymore thanks to functions, where rather than thinking "when this case occurs, goto this instruction" we call the required function in charge of that specific task providing arguments or context as we go.
We may then agree that GOTO is not really a must have while functions are, with all the power and flexibility we might need, and specially in JavaScript.

On Block-Scope

JavaScript has theoretically no block-scope concept, at least until very latest versions of ECMAScript where blocks can be written in the wild.
Blocks are cool for partially independent operations that should not affect at all the external scope/logic but if we think more about this, the usage of inline function expressions has replaced the block-scope concept for a while.
Even better, any function in JS could be considered a sort of equivalent of a block scope, with the advantage that we can re-call the same function as many times as we want, with limits in recursions, avoiding the GOTO and still using block-scopes.

All Together

What if we use as many functions as we need, in order to complete our flow, without compromising the external environment and being able to re-call segments of our flow when something goes wrong?
This can be easily done with a queue system, like the one showed below:


A Few Examples

Here a very basic example on how to use above queue system. There are two sequential things to do, waiting for some truish condition then do something.

Queue([
function (q) {
q.wait(document.body);
},
function onBodyPresent(q) {
document.body.innerHTML = "Hello queue!";
}
]);

The wait() method calls next "block" to execute, as next function, if any, only if the condition passed as argument is true, waiting otherwise "0 ms", if not specified differently, before the same "wait for" block logic is re-executed.
While this example does not show real potentials of queues based programming approach, the next one could do it.

!function () {
var
init = function (q) {
if (!result) {
number = Math.abs(prompt("factorial of:")) || 1;
result = 1;
}
q.next();
},
verify = function (q) {
if (1 < number) {
result *= number--;
q.unshift.apply(
q,
program.slice(
program.indexOf(init),
program.indexOf(verify) + 1
)
);
}
q.next();
},
showResult = function (q) {
alert(result);
q.next();
},
program = Queue([
init, verify, showResult
]).slice(),
result, number
;
}();

Above code is a factorial program: all logic blocks are known in advance and the queue is constantly re-populated until the condition in the middle is satisfied.
While performances are not the best, but generally speaking performances are never a problem when a queue logic is needed, since queues are awesome specially for asynchronous tasks that are rarely good for real-time programming, this factorial program does not use recursion, is quite easier to understand and debug, and it does not blow the RAM usage: functions are recycled as well as the queue which will never grow more than 3 indexes so just wait ... and the result at some point will appear ;-)

Asynchronous Example

As I have said already, queues are great for asynchronous tasks helping with indentation, never too many nested functions, logical workflow, each function does a little but it does it well, readability, functions are named in a semantic way but minifiers will simply shrink them once executed, and even if this does not look that OOP, I bet once we start getting use to this approach things will be easier than ever.

!function () {
// warning: this code is a proof of concept
// it won't work as it is ...
var
// query selector shortcut
$ = function (css) {
return document.querySelector(css);
},
// while user and pass fields are empty ...
login = function (q) {
q.wait(
$("#user").value.trim()
&&
$("#pass").value.trim()
);
},
// once user and pass are not empty anymore
verify = function (q) {
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest;
xhr.open("post", "verify.php", true);
xhr.send([
"user=" + encodeURIComponent($("#user").value.trim()),
"pass=" + encodeURIComponent($("#pass").value.trim())
].join("&"));
xhr.onreadystatechange = function () {
if (xhr.readyState == 4) {
q.result = xhr.responseText;
// call next function
q.next();
}
};
},
// verify if the user exists
authorized = function (q) {
if (q.result === "ok") {
q.push(ok);
} else {
// notify the error plus re-queue logic between
// login and authorized included
q.push.apply(q, [error].concat(program.slice(
program.indexOf(login),
program.indexOf(authorized) + 1
)));
}
q.next();
},
// end of the program
ok = function (q) {
alert("Welcome!");
// could go on with the same queue
// passing through a different program
},
// warning for the user
// plus resetting fields
error = function (q) {
alert("user or pass not recognized");
$("#user").value = "";
$("#pass").value = "";
q.next();
},
// clone of the whole program
// reused later to recycle segments
program = Queue([
login, verify, authorized
]).slice()
;
}();


Where Queues Are Used

Well, almost everywhere ... Testing Frameworks are usually based on queues, specially those with asynchronous support for different tests. Same is for JavaScript or CSS loaders, based on queues when it comes to order.
Any sort of stack/Array not representing data, is usually a queue we consume during our logic ... promises are queues too, and same is for events, these are all queues.
Should I explain more? Probably yes, but I'd prefer if you have a look at these examples, use the simple Queue function I have written, and create something awesome that makes the logic of your app cleaner and better organized.
Last, but not least, did I mention that logging a queue gives us instantly a logic workflow of what's going on and accordingly with where it's going on? console.log(q.slice()) anywhere you need and you'll see all named functions you gonna deal with after the one is executing in that moment.