Promises are a lot like Transform streams. Once they are ready, they push forward a result. Presumably the sole difference is that promises just carry one result, while streams, well produce a stream of results.

Look at the example given in the PromiseKit Introduction:

login()                         // returns a Promise
  .then {
    return API.fetchKittens()   // also returns a Promise
  }
  .then { fetchedKittens in
    self.kittens = fetchedKittens
    self.tableView.reloadData() // does not return a promise
  }
  .error { error in
    UIAlertView(…).show()
  }

Loading all kittens into memory before handing them off may not be the right thing to do. Essentially everytime you have something which produces a collection of elements you might rather consider a stream (and get all the streaming features like buffering, back-pressure control, filtering etc.)

Having said that, it is a waste to produce a full stream if you just need to carry forward a single value. Like the login() action in the sample.

Noze.io comes with a simple Promise implementation. Not sure whether that makes sense.

Swift Promises

There are a few libraries, I guess we just need a very simple Noze.io specific implementation. It looks like a Promise should be a generic, encapsulating arbitrary return values.

Noze.io promises would be a little easier than generic Swift promises as we don’t need support for multithreading (no barriers and such).