happened

happened is a tiny PubSub library (~700 bytes minified and gzipped). It's designed to have a minimal viable set of features, making it an ideal choice for using in your own library or size-sensitive client code.

Examples

happened does not try include any unnecessary functionality in the core, but that doesn't mean that it's hard to use in all the common cases.

Basic usage

Calling happened.create() without any parameters will construct a new instance, that can be used as an event bus:

var happened = require('happened');
var topSecretMessages = happened.create();
topSecretMessages.on('mission', function (type) {
    console.log('completed mission ' + type);
});
topSecretMessages.trigger('mission', 'impossible'); // "completed mission impossible"

This can also work as global event bus — just wrap it in a requirable module:

// my-global-bus.js
var happened = require('happened');
module.exports = happened.create();
 
// my-other-file.js
var globalBus = require('./my-global-bus');
globalBus.on('disco', function () {
    console.log('dance');
});
globalBus.trigger('disco'); // "dance"

Mixin for Objects

It's a very common need to have PubSub methods directly exposed on some object, or all objects of a given class. This is usually solved by providing a mixin (e.g. Backbone.Events), which has a downside of a need to define a property on an object, that can conflict with your own properties, or even cause compiler deoptimization if it's injected dynamically by on method.

All the methods on happened instance can be called in any context, so that means that they can be simply copied in the constructor of your class:

var happened = require('happened');
 
function Artist() {
    var events = happened.create();
    // you can choose which methods to copy from happened
    this.on = events.on;
    this.once = events.once;
    this.off = events.off;
    this.trigger = events.trigger;
    
    // additionally if you want to provide support to subscribe
    // to all events it's a good idea to copy corresponding constant
    this.ALL_EVENTS = events.ALL_EVENTS;
}
 
var superMetalBand = new Artist();
superMetalBand.on('concert', function () {
    console.log('scream');
});
superMetalBand.trigger('concert'); // "scream"

Since this is quite verbose happened provides a helper method for this common case:

function Artist() {
    happened.addTo(this);
}

Public Channels

The basic implementation of public channels is to return the same instance of happened, given the same string, representing the name of the channel, which is exactly what more general memoization function does, which is available for example in lodash:

var happened = require('happened');
var _ = require('lodash');
var channel = _.memoize(happened.create);
 
var radioOne = channel('radio1');
radio1.on('morning-broadcast', function () {
    console.log('wake up');
});
 
// in another place
channel('radio1').trigger('morning-broadcast'); // "wake up"

If you want to keep dependencies minimal it's also easy to write it yourself:

var channel = (function () {
    var cache = {};
    return function (name) {
        return cache.hasOwnProperty(name) ? cache[name] : (cache[name] = happened.create());
    };
})();

At this point you are probably wondering why this is not included in the library itself. The are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly this is not an essential functionality that would be required by every use case. But more importantly, since happened.create() can accept options argument specifying a custom scheduler (and may be some other options later on) it, there is no way to unambiguously what would be the result of theoretical happened.channel('one', options) === happened.channel('one', options2).

More Good Stuff

• Zero dependencies
• Minimal interface (on, once, off, trigger), with utility methods exposed only on a global object.
• UMD package
• Support for custom schedulers.
• Support for legacy browsers like IE6-8 and Android 2.3
• Node.js support
• all happened instances are frozen (immutable) if supported by environment

Requirements

happened by default uses asynchronous event dispatching. If you want events to be dispatched faster, you can use scheduler option in happened.create call to specify other schedulers, such as setImmediate for macro-task behavior or process.nextTick for micro-tasks.

Default async (setTimeout) mode is supported for all mainstream browsers and Node.js, but may not work in some esoteric environments, like Qt QML. In this case it falls back to synchronous scheduler.

If you want to always create instance of happened with sync scheduler, you can create a simple proxy function:

function createSyncEvents() {
    return happened.create({ scheduler: happened.SYNC });
}

API

This section contains reference for all public methods and properties of happened, to see example usage please refer to examples section instead.

Type signatures for methods are presented using flow syntax.

Top-Level Library Methods and Properties

happened.create()

Constructs a new instance of happened.

happened.create(options : Object?) => HappenedInstance

Right now the only supported field in options is scheduler:

var nextTickBus = happened.create({ scheduler: process.nextTick.bind(process) });

happened.addTo()

This is convenience method to create a new instance of happened and copy it's methods on, once, off, trigger and a constant ALL_EVENTS to a given target:

happened.addTo(target : Object, source : HappenedInstance?) => HappenedInstance

Calling this function without a source will create a new instance of happened, but you can also provide one in case you want to share event bus between several object or you want to use an instance with custom scheduler:

var foo = {};
happened.addTo(foo, happened.create({ scheduler: happened.SYNC }));

Instance Methods

on

This method is used to subscribe for a certain event:

happenedInstance.on(
    name     : string,
    callback : (...params) => void,
    thisArg  : Object?
) => void

The callback will receive all the parameters except for the name of the event from trigger as it's arguments. thisArg is optional context for callback.

Special case here is subscribing to all events, happening on the instance. To do this you need to provide ALL_EVENTS constant property available on all instances.

happenedInstance.on(
    happened.ALL_EVENTS,
    callback : (name : string, params : Array<any>) => void,
    thisArg  : Object?
) => void

NOTE: callback for all events has a different signature to a regular one, due to a need to pass event name.

once

Same as on, but causes the callback to only fire once before being offed.

happenedInstance.once(
    name     : string,
    callback : (...params) => void,
    thisArg  : Object?
) => void

off

Removes a specific callback for an event with a given name.

happenedInstance.off(
    name     : string?,
    callback : Function?
) => void

If called without callback, removes all callbacks for given name.

If called without any arguments, remove all callbacks for all events.

trigger

Triggers callbacks for the given event name, additional ...params to trigger will be passed along to the event callbacks.

happenedInstance.trigger(
    name      : string,
    ...params : any
) => void

Contributing

Setting Up Development Environment

To start do a fork of this repo, clone it locally and type in your terminal:

npm install
gulp tdd

This will continuously run tests for nice dev experience. To run tests just once or in CI environment you can use:

gulp test

To build for production run:

gulp build

License

© 2015 Dmitriy Kubyshkin. Licensed under the MIT style license.