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
    Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS

    Introduction For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular. In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...

  • By
    Vibration API

    Many of the new APIs provided to us by browser vendors are more targeted toward the mobile user than the desktop user.  One of those simple APIs the Vibration API.  The Vibration API allows developers to direct the device, using JavaScript, to vibrate in...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create Snook-Style Navigation Using MooTools

    Jonathan Snook debuted a great tutorial last September detailing how you can use an image and a few jQuery techniques to create a slick mouseover effect. I revisited his article and ported its two most impressive effects to MooTools. The Images These are the same...

  • By
    Telephone Link Protocol

    We've always been able to create links with protocols other than the usual HTTP, like mailto, skype, irc ,and more;  they're an excellent convenience to visitors.  With mobile phone browsers having become infinitely more usable, we can now extend that convenience to phone numbers: The tel...

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!