Comments on: Managing Events As Relationships, Not Just References

By: Steve Gentile

Steve Gentile — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 02:37:00 +0000

Good write and explanation. i actually stopped using Backbone because I was constantly dealing with Zombies :)

The listenTo and your explanation is good, I think might stir me to rethink this.

By: Adrian Miu

Adrian Miu — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 20:17:00 +0000

I’m not familiar with Backbone’s subtleties but In the basketball example I think that observers (score board, players, spectators) should subscribe to a, for the lack of a better term, “global” event which is triggered when the ball passes through the net. This way the observers are not required to be aware of the subject (much like in life, when a spectator learns about a player scored from the cheers of the other spectators, not from looking at the net).

By: Tim Hemphill

Tim Hemphill — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 16:04:00 +0000

Really comprehensive article and explanation of the new listenTo and stopListening functions (thanks Backbone!). I’m in the thick of dealing with this same problem and this has really helped me sort it all out. Great stuff, man. Keep it coming.

By: Derick Bailey

Derick Bailey — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 17:28:00 +0000

Thanks :)

I was very excited to see listenTo / stopListening, as well. I had previously written my own library to provide this functionality (Backbone.EventBinder). Having it baked in to Backbone means I get to drop a few hundred lines of code from my plugins and app frameworks :D

By: Derick Bailey

Derick Bailey — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 17:26:00 +0000

:) thanks!

I was definitely jumping off that deep end when I first wrote this, too. I actually had a “stop using .on / .off” section in the first version. It wasn’t until I got a friend to review the article that I realized how much of a bad idea that was. :D

By: Simon Boudrias

Simon Boudrias — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 17:22:00 +0000

Hey, really nice article there (as always)! I really like the paragraph about “no silver bullet”; must’ve been to exited about `listenTo` implementation, that I completly forgot that on/off still are really usefull and that the choice between both technique must be though to best fit your needs.

By: Ryan Roemer

Ryan Roemer — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 20:30:00 +0000

Great high-level description, analogy and walkthrough of the situation. At work, we came about inverting our event relationships through profiling our app’s memory usage and finding a lot of things hanging around that we didn’t expect to. We’ve been thrilled to see listenTo’s addition in Backbone.js 0.9.10, which makes this a whole lot easier to reason about and implement in the common case.