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
    Introducing MooTools Templated

    One major problem with creating UI components with the MooTools JavaScript framework is that there isn't a great way of allowing customization of template and ease of node creation. As of today, there are two ways of creating: new Element Madness The first way to create UI-driven...

  • By
    Being a Dev Dad

    I get asked loads of questions every day but I'm always surprised that they're rarely questions about code or even tech -- many of the questions I get are more about non-dev stuff like what my office is like, what software I use, and oftentimes...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Dynamic Table of Contents Using MooTools 1.2

    You've probably noticed that I shy away from writing really long articles. Here are a few reasons why: Most site visitors are coming from Google and just want a straight to the point, bail-me-out ASAP answer to a question. I've noticed that I have a hard time...

  • By
    Create Twitter-Style Dropdowns Using jQuery

    Twitter does some great stuff with JavaScript. What I really appreciate about what they do is that there aren't any epic JS functionalities -- they're all simple touches. One of those simple touches is the "Login" dropdown on their homepage. I've taken...

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!