Q

Here's how Q describes itself:

A tool for making and composing asynchronous promises in JavaScript.

Internally, Durandal uses jQuery's promise implementation in order to minimize third party dependencies. However, other libraries you use may require Q or you may need more advanced asynchronous programming capabilities than jQuery can provide. In these cases, you will want to plug Q's promise mechanism into Durandal so that you can have a single consistent promise implementation throughout. To integrate the Q library, follow these steps:

1. Add a script tag for the Q library, prior to your require.js script tag.
2. Add the following code to main.js before your call to app.start();

system.defer = function (action) {
  var deferred = Q.defer();
  action.call(deferred, deferred);
  var promise = deferred.promise;
  deferred.promise = function () {
    return promise;
  };
  return deferred;
};

Note: When working with Breeze or any other library which depends on Q, you should make the above patch.

Note: The above patch will not change promises returned from the http module since that uses jQuery's ajax API directly. If you are using the http module, then you may want to consider patching that manually. Something like this:

http.get = function (url, query) {
  return Q.when($.ajax(url, { data: query }));
};

Essentially, you need to wrap the jQuery ajax calls with a call to Q.when.