Observer pattern revised: The EventBus


The EventBus library is a convenient realization of the observer pattern. It works perfectly to supplement the implementation of MVC logic (model-view-controller) in event-driven UIs such as Swing. The library is similiar to the JMS API and it’s published under the Apache License 2.0.

The Event Bus is a single-process publish/subscribe event routing library, with Swing extensions. The EventBus is fully-functional, with very good API documentation and test coverage (80+%). It has been deployed in many production environments, including financial, engineering and scientific applications.

Let’s take a look at a simple example:

Events can be easily spread across the application by publishing to the bus. You can use any class you want as an event:

EventBus.publish(new MyEvent());

There are many ways to listen on events from the bus, e.g. you can consume the fired event via an annotated method in some of your controllers (the C of MVC):

@EventSubscriber(eventClass = MyEvent.class)
protected void onMyCustomEvent(MyEvent event) {
    // do something
}

Additionally each annotated subscriber has to be registered to the library:

AnnotationProcessor.process(obj);

The invocation of EventBus#publish() will result in the invocation of each subscribing method for the particular type of event.

For further information, visit: EventBus - Getting started

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