Making your Backbone objects into promises

So awesome.

I used to return back promises from my views, for example.  Now I just make my entire view implement the Promise API.  In this fashion, whomever creates the view can wait for a result (think modal popup with the possibility of multiple pages of user data being returned back to the base page).

    var MyChildView = Backbone.View.extend({
       dfd: null,

       initialize: function () {
           this.dfd = $.Deferred();
           this.dfd.promise(this); // Make the view a promise

           this.dfd.always(this.remove); // Self cleanup anyone?
       }

       //Later
       method: function () {
           this.dfd.resolve({ foo: 'bar' });
       }
    });

This enables now something like the following.

    var MyParentView = Backbone.View.extend({
       render: function () {
           var childview = new MyChildView();
           childView.then(this.doSomethingElse); // Do something meaningful with the promise
       }
    });

This approach is clearly superior than events or success callbacks when your parent is waiting on the result of its child. It also allows your views to become parent of entire asynchronous workflows orchestrated with promises.