OMG - I think I am grokking it!!! Very useful articles http://www.2ality.com/2014/10/es6-promises-api.html https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Promise http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/es6/promises/

Ok, I did a simple little example. In this example, I am going to read in the contents of a file using async fs.readfile.

coffee fs = require 'fs' {Promise} = require 'es6-promise'

Ok, so we are using the es6-promise module - we need to import Promise (which we are doing with destructured assignement).

coffee myReadFile = (file) -> new Promise (resolve, reject) -> fs.readFile file, (err, data) -> if data? resolve data.toString() else reject err

Create a function with a new Promise object. The object returns two methods to use - resolve (call with data) and reject (call with an error). To passback data, call resolve data. Similarly, for errors, reject err.

To run the function once…

coffee myReadFile 'test.txt' .then (response) -> console.log response .catch (err) -> console.log err

The Promise.then method will be called when fs.readFile calls resolve method (with data as a parameter) and the Promise.catch method is invoked when reject is called (with err as a paramter).

Let’s extend this example to a list of files where the Promise.all method will run when all of the Promises are completed.

```coffee files2 = [‘test.txt’, ‘test2.txt’, ‘test3.txt’] allresponses = files.map myReadFile

Promise.all(allresponses) .then (response) -> console.log response .catch (err) -> console.log err ```

In this case, the Promise.all method is called when all of the Promise objects have been resovled.

Ok, let’s chain some functions together.

coffee myReadFile 'test.txt' .then (response) -> console.log 'single run test with chainables' console.log response # return response print response # call print function .then (response) -> console.log response jump response # call jump function .then (response) -> console.log response .catch (err) -> console.log err

This is the most simple promise

```coffee theMostSimplePromise = (phrase) -> new Promise (resolve) -> resolve phrase

theMostSimplePromise(‘print this’) .then (response) -> console.log response ```

when you create a new Promise, the constructor returns two functions, resolve and reject. The object exposes several methods to call, .then, .catch, .all, .race.