A few days ago I made a bare-minimum fork of jQuery so that I could use $.Deferred in node js (basically the $.is_blank utilities, $.extend, and $.each). It's located here:  https://github.com/kirbysayshi/jquery-jqd/blob/master/jquery-jqd.js (I had to rename my fork because I had a name conflict with Cloud9IDE). A super quick test for node is located here: https://github.com/kirbysayshi/jquery-jqd/blob/master/app.js. When I have some time later today, I'm going to try and use this with the mongodb-native driver as a true test. 

My reasoning for the strip: jQuery is so popular, that it would be nice to be able to use the same deferred API server-side, without the required overhead of jsDOM. I recall seeing some threads that may have frowned upon creating a server-side-only version of jQuery, but I could see in the future having a 'jq-node' version of the library that contains the utility functions that are not DOM-dependent. While there are other implementations of deferreds, promises, futures, whatever, the popularity of jQuery basically guarantees that its implementation will be popular.

Anyway, I'm very new to deferreds, and have not done much work with the jQuery source itself, and would love opinions!