####What is When-Then?

When-Then is meant to act in the fashion of a very simple pseudo-promise.

One of the more common uses of promise/deferreds in javascript is to execute a completion function when a number of asynchronous requests are done.

While there are a number of deferred and promise libraries, for this simple use-case the extra syntax to setup a promise object can be more verbose than is necessary.

####Why would I use When-Then?

Suppose your app needs to do several asynchronous requests, but you want to work with the data only once all requests are complete.

When-Then lets you pass any number of functions as arguments, such as asynchronous requests, followed by a chained then() function that gets passed the final results.

The 'pass' function is made available to your asyncronous functions from when(). Your functions pass two parameters to pass(), being first the key you later want to access the results in, and the data being the second.

After the then() function is executed, you can access the results of your async functions using the key that you originally defined in each pass() function.

####Examples

//#### TEST CASE 1 ####
when(
    function(pass){
        pass('tm0', 2);
    },
    function(pass){

        setTimeout(function(){
            pass('tm1', 1000);
        }, 1000);

    },
    function(pass){
        
        setTimeout(function(){
            pass('tm2', 100);
        }, 100);

    },
    function(pass){
        
        setTimeout(function(){
            pass('tm3', 2000);
        }, 2000);

    }
)
.then(function(results){
    console.log(results);
    
    // returns an object 
    //{
    //    tm0: 2,
    //    tm1: 1000,
    //    tm2: 100,
    //    tm3: 2000,
    //}
})



//#### TEST CASE 2 (Node.js required) ####
var http = require('http');

var get = function(url, pass){
    http.get({ host: url, port: 80 }, function(res){
        var body = [];
        res.on('data', function(chunk){
            body.push(chunk);
        })
        .on('end', function(){
            
            pass(url, body.join(''));
            
        });
    })
    .on('error', function(err){
        pass(err);
    });
}

when( 
    function(pass){
        get('www.google.com', pass);
    },
    function(pass){
        get('news.ycombinator.com', pass);
    },
    function(pass){
        get('io9.com', pass);
    }
)
.then(function(results){

    console.log(results);

    //returns an object
    //{
    //    'www.google.com': 'data would be here',
    //    'www.ycombinator.com': 'data would be here',
    //    'io9.com': 'data would be here'
    //}

});