Simplest way to wait some asynchronous tasks complete, in Javascript?

I see you are using mongoose so you are talking about server-side JavaScript. In that case I advice looking at async module and use async.parallel(...). You will find this module really helpful - it was developed to solve the problem you are struggling with. Your code may look like this

var async = require('async');

var calls = [];

['aaa','bbb','ccc'].forEach(function(name){
    calls.push(function(callback) {
        conn.collection(name).drop(function(err) {
            if (err)
                return callback(err);
            console.log('dropped');
            callback(null, name);
        });
    }
)});

async.parallel(calls, function(err, result) {
    /* this code will run after all calls finished the job or
       when any of the calls passes an error */
    if (err)
        return console.log(err);
    console.log(result);
});

Use Promises.

var mongoose = require('mongoose');

mongoose.connect('your MongoDB connection string');
var conn = mongoose.connection;

var promises = ['aaa', 'bbb', 'ccc'].map(function(name) {
  return new Promise(function(resolve, reject) {
    var collection = conn.collection(name);
    collection.drop(function(err) {
      if (err) { return reject(err); }
      console.log('dropped ' + name);
      resolve();
    });
  });
});

Promise.all(promises)
.then(function() { console.log('all dropped)'); })
.catch(console.error);

This drops each collection, printing “dropped” after each one, and then prints “all dropped” when complete. If an error occurs, it is displayed to stderr.

---

Previous answer (this pre-dates Node’s native support for Promises):

Use Q promises or Bluebird promises.

With Q:

var Q = require('q');
var mongoose = require('mongoose');

mongoose.connect('your MongoDB connection string');
var conn = mongoose.connection;

var promises = ['aaa','bbb','ccc'].map(function(name){
    var collection = conn.collection(name);
    return Q.ninvoke(collection, 'drop')
      .then(function() { console.log('dropped ' + name); });
});

Q.all(promises)
.then(function() { console.log('all dropped'); })
.fail(console.error);

With Bluebird:

var Promise = require('bluebird');
var mongoose = Promise.promisifyAll(require('mongoose'));

mongoose.connect('your MongoDB connection string');
var conn = mongoose.connection;

var promises = ['aaa', 'bbb', 'ccc'].map(function(name) {
  return conn.collection(name).dropAsync().then(function() {
    console.log('dropped ' + name);
  });
});

Promise.all(promises)
.then(function() { console.log('all dropped'); })
.error(console.error);