That's a good concise explanation. The book "High Performance JavaScript"[0] also does a good job explaining how closures work, and includes some visuals that really hammered it home I thought.

[0] -- http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596802806.do

I was wondering when some of these types of libs might make their way into the world, I know I saw in Nicholas Zakas' book "High Performance JavaScript"[1] that he demonstrated how to read back (process) a large AJAX result in chunks, allowing you to begin working with the response before it was finished downloading. It was called "multipart XHR", and he shows a neat code example and then links to a site that has sample code[2].

The main difference between multipart XHR and Oboe, that I can see, is that MHXR requires you to format your data in a specific manner (using a magic delimiting character), though I'm curious if the base method is similar or not.

1. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596802806.do

2. http://techfoolery.com/mxhr/