Do we need to support async requests?

[dshemetov]

We have async request functionality here. Not having worked with async much, I have questions:

• what is the main use case?
• can we do without it?

My guess at the first is: it helps when making many requests in parallel. My guess at the second is: yes, we don't have that functionality in epidatr and that client works well enough.

Removing async support would reduce maintenance work and would allow us to switch completely to delphi-epidata.py as the backend (see #29).

There is an async smoke test here and a regular one here. Those could provide some good examples to get started in testing.

[dshemetov]

Found some discussion from a while ago.

[dshemetov]

Also this issue.

[dshemetov]

TL;DR of above issues:

• async calls were originally intended to get around row limits and pagination in the old PHP server
• current row limits are much larger and we don't do pagination, thus this feature is no longer necessary
• async it will be deprecated in covidcast client and eventually downstream code will stop using it
• we can therefore remove this functionality here and simplify the code, this work will happen here refactor+clean: simplify package internals and clean configs #28

[dshemetov]

Closed by #28