MooTools Event Delegation

By  on  

One feature I heard Moo developers hinting at was the future addition of event delegation to the MooTools JavaScript library. MooTools Core Developer, Aaron Newton, wrote a post today about a plugin he's created that does just that.

From the article:

Event delegation is a common practice where by you attach an event listener to a parent object to monitor its children rather than attach events to all the children. It's far more efficient when you have numerous items on a page that you want to interact with.

I don't know of any concrete plans to incorporate this functionality into MooTools 1.3 but I assume they will. I strongly suggest MooTools developers read Aaron's article at Clientcide. I also recommend this article for jQuery users as John Resig recently boasted of this addition to jQuery.

Exciting times in the framework world!

Recent Features

  • By
    Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools

    MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does.  Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up.  I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own.  In any event...

  • By
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools CountDown Plugin

    There are numerous websites around the internet, RapidShare for example, that make you wait an allotted amount of time before presenting you with your reward. Using MooTools, I've created a CountDown plugin that allows you to easily implement a similar system. The MooTools JavaScript The CountDown class...

  • By
    Geolocation API

    One interesting aspect of web development is geolocation; where is your user viewing your website from? You can base your language locale on that data or show certain products in your store based on the user's location. Let's examine how you can...

Discussion

  1. John Resig, boasting!? GASP!

    Thanks for the news David! … I’ve never been a fan of delegated events/event handlers – do they even bubble/propogate?

  2. Let me add that event delegation is awesome when you’re continually adding DOM elements, perhaps via Ajax… I’m just not sure the performance benefits are as they seem.

  3. @James: I didn’t mean “boasted” in a bad way. It’s an awesome addition which should be boasted. You can find the answer to your question here:

    http://groups.google.com/group/mootools-users/browse_thread/thread/bbaf247948273868/db6a33205b71c89b?show_docid=db6a33205b71c89b

  4. Daniel

    James, believe me with even a couple hundred elements you can see a big difference. It takes a few more elements to make a browser like Chrome slow up, but IE folks will see the difference on smaller numbers of events like night and day.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!