I am working on a javascript project that needs to get some data and process it, but I am having trouble with the asynchronous nature of JavaScript. What I want to be able to do is something like the following.

//The set of functions that I want to call in order

function getData() {

    //gets the data

}



function parseData() {

    //does some stuff with the data

}



function validate() {

    //validates the data

}



//The function that orchestrates these calls 

function runner() {

    getData();

    parseData();

    validate();

}

Here I want each function to wait for completion before going on to the next call, as I am running into the situation where the program attempts to validate the data before it has been retrieved. However, I also want to be able to return a value from these functions for testing, so I can't have these functions return a boolean value to check completion. How can I make javascript wait on the function to run to completion before moving on to the next call?