Tyler Close answers questions after his talk (click to enlarge)

Tyler Close of Waterken fame presented a way of using promises to produce succinct JavaScript (and Java) code for doing multiple asynchronous requests with a Web server. The idea of promises in asynchronous systems was developed by Barbara Liskov in the late 80's. Tyler has a tutorial online. I also found this description from Brian Lothar of Web calculus which discusses promises in that context. Very interesting stuff. I think this was my favorite presentation of WWW2008.