EventEmitter in nodejs

Submitted by hemanth on Sun, 12/16/2012 - 21:12

Sometime back had pawed at Making promises with javascript but node school of thought offers an attractive pattern of EventEmitters. 

EventEmitters are very much similar to PubSub, but is more tightly coupled and gives more control.

I shall try to demonstrate these EventEmiters with few simple code snippets.

// Let's make a child ;)
var child = new (require('events').EventEmitter);
 
// Child's response 
child.once("born",function(){console.log("Say : Hello World!");});
child.on("cry",function(){console.log("The child is crying!");});
child.on("laugh",function(){console.log("Awe that is cute :)");});
 
//By default listener limit is 10, it can be increased using:
child.setMaxListeners(100);
 
// Let the events emmit.
child.emit("born");
child.emit("cry");
child.emit("laugh");
 
if(child.emit("born")){
   // This wont execute 
   console.log("Born again!");
}
// Because birth is an one time event.
console.log(child.emit("born"));

Output : 

Say : Hello World!
The child is crying!
Awe that is cute :)
false

On a serious note, we can use this in a real programming scenario like :

db.insert({...},function(err,Record){  
if(error) emit("insertFailed",{err:err, customer:customer});  
else emit("added",customer);  
}

Anyway happy coding! Enjoy Emitting Events :)

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