#Naming
First off, I'd name my variables in the purpose they serve. Rather than ord
, funcHash
or even me
.
#Queue adding and removing
You should remove the items that have executed from the queue. That's what a queue is all about, and that's what your code lacks at the moment.
Also, unshift
and shift
are more costly operations than 'pop' and 'push' because they need to move the array contents to new indices. You're correct in your implementation, that enqueue
should use the unshift
while execution uses pop
.
#Collection of callbacks
You don't need 2 arrays to store the order of named queues. You can have one array, but each item is named.
function enqueue(fn,name){
queue.push({
name : name,
fn : fn
})
}
You can then use Array.prototype.filter
to filter out the queue, if you want to only unload certain queued items with a certain name. Here's how you can do it:
function dequeue(name){
var fns = queue.filter(function(current){
return (current.name === name);
});
// pop-off and run
}
This code defaults to all items when name
is not supplied
function dequeueAll(name){
var fns = (!name) ? queue : queue.filter(function(current){
return (current.name === name);
});
// pop-off and run all
}
Async control
Now, you don't have total control over the process that takes place in the queued function. The user could pop-in an async operation, and your library won't even know it, and will run wild. That's where your deferreds come in to play.
However, you don't really need deferreds. You can pass in a function to the queued function that calls the next function. This is similar to ExpressJS's middlewares, where there's a magical next
function supplied to each middleware. Here's how it's implemented
// Lets assume you have a queue like the one above, filtered optionally
(function recursive(index){
// get the item at the index
var currentItem = queue[index];
// This is to check if there's no more functions in the queue
if(!currentItem) return;
//Otherwise, run providing the instance of your object, and the magic "next"
currentItem.fn.call(instance,function(){
//This function gets called when the current queued item is done executing
// Splice off this item from the queue. We use splice since the
// item we might be operating on is from a filtered set, not in the same
// index as the original queue
queue.splice(queue.indexOf(currentItem),1);
// Run the next item
recursive(++index);
});
Here's how to use it:
// start with 0
}(0));
// So you can have something synchronous
enqueue(function(next){
//do something
next();
});
// Or something asynchronous
enqueue(function(next){
somethingAsync(function(){
next();
});
});
#Demonstration
Here's a small demo I have made here. It has some bugs in some corner cases and needs a few fixing. But given your code example, it works quite similarly. Not to mention, it is a bit shorter, and uses no libraries.