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Mar 24

Event Driven Architecture in JavaScript is fun; Bespin Extensibility

Ajax, Bespin, JavaScript, Tech Add comments

In former times (I love how Germans say that) I spent time working on event driven systems and busses. Those unfortunate enough to work with Enterprise JavaBeans were happy when Message Driven beans were announced as they could tell the pointy hair chaps that they were indeed doing EJB, and would continue working in their MOM architecture.

Now I fast forward to my days with JavaScript, and I remember getting excited to see the common JavaScript libraries support custom events. I now had a very nice way to work with my library to use event driven architecture on the client side, which is actually quite natural to do too. We see this pattern in desktop APIs such as Cocoa, and it helps enforce the practice of responsive applications for end users.

I may have taken this notion to the extreme a little in Bespin.

We have a general event system to put general work and you will also find that most of the components of Bespin also have their own events.js. A component will often load up the events by doing something like this:

// from within the editor itself, pass into the event system so the events are in scope
new bespin.editor.Events(this);

The event class will take in that component, put it in scope, and then an event can just use it. Note the use of editor here:

dojo.declare("bespin.editor.Events", null, {
    constructor: function(editor) {
        bespin.subscribe("editor:openfile:opensuccess", function(event) {
            editor.model.insertDocument(event.file.content);
            editor.cursorManager.moveCursor({ row: 0, col: 0 });
        });
    }
 
    // ... all of the events
});

As new events come into play for the editor, this is where they will naturally be placed.

There have been some really nice fall outs of this approach. It has been really nice to have the notion of “this just happened, if anyone is interested, here is some info.” There is no need to find an object and call a method on it…. the event bus just takes care of it all for you.

There has been a nice side effect in the case of sharing commands across different parts of the application. Take the dashboard vs. the editor itself. Both have a command called newfile that looks a bit like this:

bespin.cmd.commands.add({
    name: 'newfile',
    takes: ['filename', 'project'],
    preview: 'create a new buffer for file',
    completeText: 'optionally, name the new filename first, and then the name of the project second',
    withKey: "CTRL SHIFT N",
    execute: function(self, args) {
        if (args.filename) {
            args.newfilename = args.filename;
            delete args.filename;
        }
        bespin.publish("editor:newfile", args || {});
    }
});

The core piece is that the command basically just sends an event of type editor:newfile. On the other side of the coin, who is listening to this event? Well, in the case of the dashboard, it changes the URL to the editor itself, but if you are already in the editor itself, you don’t need to do that, and can just clear the editor buffer and file state.

Having commands at this high level means that they are easy to share.

We do need to do some more thinking about when it makes sense to promote something to be a full fledged event. In general I like the idea that people can write plugins and extension code that only requires them to grok some events and they are in and out in a jiffy.

However, some team members have brought me down to Earth and I realize that if we go too far here we will be reinventing method dispatch itself, and in a way that is only asynchronous :)

We don’t want to go that far. The no-brainer use cases are for typical call backs such as “a file has opened, care?” Something that an event asking for something to be done (e.g. newfile above) is a more subtle item and shouldn’t be over used.

Another side effect from using this model is that I remember exactly how much I like named parameters, which is why you will see the pattern is publish(eventName, argumentsHash). Dojo allows you to pass in multiple arguments, and in fact makes it harder to only send in one object as you have to dojo.publish(eventName, [ one ]). The [ ... ] looked ugly, so we wrapped the mechanism as bespin.publish(...). We also did this because we wanted to be a layer above the implementation. The Prototype version used Element.observe() and Element.bind() and we had to change all of that work in the port. Hopefully we won’t have to do this if a major change happens in the future.

Fun times! I will also write-up the effects of this, and how extensibility kicks in with Bespin on commands, your configuration, and plugins.

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