Forums

The forums ran from 2008-2020 and are now closed and viewable here as an archive.

Home Forums JavaScript jQuery call backs vs chaining. When to use what? Reply To: jQuery call backs vs chaining. When to use what?

#186246
__
Participant

It’s not quite as straightforward a question as you seem to think. It generally has more to do with how the function is written than what it does.

Chaining is when you call a method on an object, the method does something, and then returns the original object. It literally is like a link in a chain.

object--→method--→does something--┐
   ↑                              |
   └---returns original object----┘

Callbacks are like (upside-down) trees. You give the function another function, with the expectation that the original function will call your function at some point (often, when done, but this is not a requirement).

function(callback)--→does something
                          └--→calls callback

jQuery does mainly chaining.

Javascript, in general, is very well-suited to using callbacks.

You may have heard of “promises”, the syntax of which looks like chaining, but is actually a pattern of managing callbacks.