Why .now()? (Objectify)

Question

Why would I ever want to load an Objectify entity asynchronously? And what does asynchronous loading actually mean?

According to Objectify documentation about loading,

Answer 1

Asynchronous operations start a network fetch to the backend and then let your code continue executing. The advantage of async operations is that you can run several of them in parallel:

Result th1 = ofy().load().key(thingKey1);
Result th2 = ofy().load().key(thingKey2);
Result th3 = ofy().load().key(thingKey3);
th1.now();
th2.now();
th3.now();

This executes significantly faster than calling now() immediately each time. Note this is a bad example because you probably would use a batch get (which also parallelizes the operation) but you can have several queries, saves, deletes, etc running simultaneously.

now() always forces synchronous completion, blocking until done.