The Community Responds to AS3 Signals

The community response to my Signals event system has been very encouraging. In the two days since I opened it to the public, there have been dozens of comments on my announcement and re-tweets. People have been quite positive and interested. No one has told me I'm wasting my time (you could be the first!).

The best part has been people's insights for improving Signals. I'm been rapidly integrating them as you can see in my commits for the last two days. A special thanks goes out to Richard Lord for helping me understand AS3 event bubbling and how to implement it in Signal.

Connecting EventDispatchers to Signals

[EDIT: I renamed EventDispatcherSignal to NativeRelaySignal]

I received a very clever idea by Jacob Wright for relaying EventDispatcher events to Signal listeners. I implemented it in a new EventDispatcherSignal NativeRelaySignal class. It lets you easily wire, say, a Sprite to send native events through your own signals. The same goes for any object that implements IEventDispatcher.

Here's how you could create a Sprite subclass that uses a Signal for the click event:

public function MySprite()
{
 click = new NativeRelaySignal(this, 'click', MouseEvent);
}

// listen elsewhere
function onClick(e:MouseEvent):void { ... }

mySpriteInstance.click.add(onClick);
// fire a MouseEvent manually to test
mySpriteInstance.dispatchEvent(new MouseEvent()); // onClick is fired

The implementation of wiring the Signal to the IEventDispatcher is very simple:

[EDIT] I added listener count checking to avoid bugs (thanks to Richard Lord).

// in NativeRelaySignal.as
override public function add(listener:Function, priority:int = 0):void
{
 var prevListenerCount:uint = listeners.length;
 // Try to add first because it may throw an exception.
 super.add(listener);
 // Account for cases where the same listener is added twice.
 if (prevListenerCount == 0 && listeners.length == 1)
  IEventDispatcher(target).addEventListener(_name, dispatch, false, priority);
}

Also, Jacob's twin Tyler sent me some mind-bending ideas for radical memory efficiency. He takes lazy instantiation to a whole new level. I'm still reeling from thinking about things like Signal inheriting from Array and using a getter's arguments.callee as an index into a Dictionary. We'll see how this evolves.

Github vs Google Code

Question: Who would prefer using Github for the Signals project, rather than Google Code? I've used Git a bit and would be open to moving to it if contributors preferred that.