A Library to Modularly Control Asynchronous Executions

Asynchronous programming style has been widely adopted for a variety of reasons one such being the rise of Web applications. Using non-blocking operations is a major approach to enforcing asynchronous programming. A non-blocking operation requires decomposing a module that consists of a set of blocking operations into more than two modules, in turn, leading to a variety of challenges such as callback spaghetti and callback hell. This paper presents SyncAS, a library specification to address these two problems. This library specification follows the ECMAScript standard; indeed, we provide a prototype implementation for ActionScript3. SyncAS proposes a novel approach that enables programmers to virtually block a program execution and restart it at arbitrary points of the program, instead of waiting for a callback execution. As a result, programmers do not need to decompose a module even if nonblocking operations are adopted. SyncAS uses aspect-oriented programming to control the program execution in an oblivious manner.