Introduction

JavaScript makes extensive use of asynchronous processing to tackle the challenge of concurrency. This includes the events we’ve already talked about (user events, network events and timers), but it has also been expanded to provide even more powerful features. The XMLHTTPRequest object allows JavaScript to request additional resources directly in an asynchronous manner, and the more recent Fetch API updates that approach. Web workers allow parallel JavaScript processes to be run in the browser. And new ES6 syntax and constructs like Promises and the async/await keywords make asynchronous functions easier to reason about and use. In this chapter, we will explore each of these topics.