I was playing with ES6’s new Promises, for the first time, this week. Then, I was looking at the ugliness of using a browser’s setTimeout() function and thought that it would look better as a Promise.

tl;dr summary: A Simple Promise Version of “setTimeout()”

If we do it right, you simply specify the timeout period and implement a handler for then() to invoke:

timeout(5000) // Delay for 5000 ms
   .then(function () {
      // Do, here, whatever should happen when the time has elapsed…
   });

Or, since this is ES6, we might as well use arrow-function shorthand:

timeout(5000).then( () => {
   // do your thing, here…
})

Implementation

The setTimeout() already functions a bit like a Promise, without matching the promise-pattern and syntax, so converting it to a Promise is pretty easy: Read the rest of this entry »