Futures

Lucee has a number of concurrency features to aid in creating high performance applications. A modern approach to concurrency in Lucee is with the use of Futures, as provided via a community extension. See the developing applications concurrency section for a thorough review of Lucee's concurrency features.

Note: The Futures library is an open source extension which can be obtained its repository

Futures are used for executing code asynchronously from the currently executing request and providing a handle that can be passed to obtain the result of the asynchronous code when it completes. Lucee futures also have the additional capabilities in its future implementation:

• Asynchronous Callbacks
• Chaining Futures
• Yielding between Futures

Creating a basic Future

Futures in Lucee are created with the futures component:

<cfscript>
future = new future(function(){
    sleep(2000);
    return "some value"
});

/*
//Code area running in the main thread
*/

//Blocks the currently executing thread and waits for the result to finish
echo(future.get());
</cfscript>

The future takes a closure, which the closure returns some value after a delay of 2000 milliseconds. The closure will be executed in a thread which will allow the main page thread to continue executing. When the main thread gets to echo(future.get());, the future blocks the page thread while waiting for the future to finish its execution.