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
    5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It."  Can you blame us though?  We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...

  • By
    Page Visibility API

    One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?

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
    Create Digg URLs Using PHP

    Digg recently came out with a sweet new feature that allows users to create Tiny Digg URLs which show a Digg banner at the top allowing easy access to vote for the article from the page. While I love visiting Digg every once in a...

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!