What is the benefit of a 'promise' abstraction in CommonJS?

Question

I\'m reading this article and the section on the promise abstraction seems a little overly complicated to me. The following is given as an example:

requestS         


        

Answer 1

The second snippet is vulnerable to denial of service attack because example.com/foo can just return invalid json to crash the server. Even empty response is invalid JSON (though valid JS). It's like mysql_* examples with glaring SQL injection holes.

And the promise code can be improved much as well. These are equal:

requestSomeData("http://example.com/foo") // returns a promise for the response
    .then(function(response){ // ‘then’ is used to provide a promise handler
        // parse the body
        var data  = JSON.parse(response.body);

        // get the price
        var price = data.price;

        // print out the price
        print("The price is " + price);
    });

And:

requestSomeData("http://example.com/foo")
    .requestHandler(function(response){
        try {
            var data = JSON.parse(response.body);
        }
        catch(e) {
            return;
        }

        // get the price
        var price = data.price;

        // print out the price
        print("The price is " + price);
    });

If we wanted to handle the error, then these would be equal:

requestSomeData("http://example.com/foo") // returns a promise for the response
    .then(function(response){ // ‘then’ is used to provide a promise handler
        // parse the body
        var data  = JSON.parse(response.body);

        // get the price
        var price = data.price;

        // print out the price
        print("The price is " + price);
    }).catch(SyntaxError, function(e) {
        console.error(e);
    });

and:

requestSomeData("http://example.com/foo")
    .requestHandler(function(response){
        try {
            var data = JSON.parse(response.body);
        }
        catch(e) {
            //If the above had a typo like `respons.body`
            //then without this check the ReferenceError would be swallowed
            //so this check is kept to have as close equality as possible with
            //the promise code
            if(e instanceof SyntaxError) {
                console.error(e);
                return;
            }
            else {
                throw e;
            }
        }

        // get the price
        var price = data.price;

        // print out the price
        print("The price is " + price);
    });