Callbacks are a nice way of Iversion of control, but are even more powerful with deferred objects.
Basically callbacks are a way to pass back the control from a called function, the deferred/promise just do the opposite: it returns the control the called function.
Consider this scenario: a table widget, with the classic delete/modify buttons next to each row. Since the table widget is a generic component, we want to handle the delete operation on the model outside the widget, and we don’t event want to extend the generic object to do that, we want to user a callback:
onDelete: function(id_of_row) {
var that = $(this);
// call the backend and delete the record
$.ajax({
method: 'delete',
url: '/api/records/'+id_of_row
})
.done(function() {
// ok, record delete, now I should update the table
that.widget('remove_row',id_of_row);
});
}
});
In the example above: the callback first calls the backend to remove the record and then removes the row from the table (I mean the DOM). In order to do this: it needs to know something about the table widget (in this case, the method “remove_row”).
But what if we could pass the ball back to the widget? Let’s rewrite it with a deferred object:
onDelete: function(id_of_row) {
var deferred = $.Deferred();
// call the backend and delete the record
if (confirm('Delete?')) {
$.ajax({
method: 'delete',
url: '/api/records/'+id_of_row
})
.done(function() {
// ok, record delete, now I should update the table
deferred.resolve();
})
.fail(function() {
deferred.reject();
})
}
else {
deferred.reject();
}
return deferred.promise();
}
});
It’s more linear but, most important, the callback knows nothing about the remove_that_damn_row_from_the_dom method of the widget, it just passed back the control, it’s like saying “I’m done, it’s your turn”.
More separation, less documentation to read, easier to implement, less errors.
On the widget side, the callback should be treated this way
var callback_result = options.onDelete.call(widget,id);
// if the callback answer with a deferred/promise, this will
// handle it when it's resolved/rejected
if (isPromise(callback_result)) {
callback_result
.done(function() {
// ok, asynch operation on the other side is over
// remove the row from the dome
widget.widget('remove_row',id);
})
.fail(function() {
// do nothing
})
}
Eventbroadcast it’s a small library to improve the functionality of bind()/trigger() methods.
This plugin extends jQuery with the method $.trigger(‘
The main problem with the classic jQuery $(‘
With the Publish/Subscribe pattern it’s easy to decouple the code in charge to create the event from the code that receives it: the event emitter doesn’t know (and doesn’t care), at runtime, who is listening to the event (speaking with the words of academics, it’s not aware of the topology of the elements).
The more the code is decoupled, the more is maintanable.
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