Question

While simple, interface-driven event notification frameworks in Java have been around since pre-Cambrian times (e.g. java.beans.PropertyChangeSupport), it is becoming increasingly popular for frameworks to use annotation-driven event notification instead.

For an example, see JBossCache 2.2. The listener class has its listener methods annotated, rather than conforming to a rigid interface. This is rather easier to program to, and easier to read, since you don’t have to write empty implementations of listener callbacks that you’re not interested in (and yes, I know about listener adapter superclasses).

Here’s a sample from the JBossCache docs:

@CacheListener
public class MyListener {
   @CacheStarted
   @CacheStopped
   public void cacheStartStopEvent(Event e) {
         switch (e.getType()) {
            case Event.Type.CACHE_STARTED:
               System.out.println("Cache has started");
               break;    
            case Event.Type.CACHE_STOPPED:    
               System.out.println("Cache has stopped");
               break;    
         }
   }    

   @NodeCreated    
   @NodeRemoved
   @NodeVisited
   @NodeModified
   @NodeMoved
   public void logNodeEvent(NodeEvent ne) {
         log("An event on node " + ne.getFqn() + " has occured");
   }

}

The problem with this, is that it’s very much more of an involved process writing the framework to support this sort of thing, due to the annotation-reflection nature of it.

So, before I charge off down the road of writing a generic framework, I was hoping someone had done it already. Has anyone come across such a thing?

Answer 1

You can already do this today with EventBus.

Following example is from EventBus Getting Started guide. Statusbar that updates based on published events, and no need to register statusbar control/widget as listener of publisher(s). Without EventBus, statusbar will need to be added as listener to many classes. Statusbar can also be created and destroyed at any time.

public StatusBar extends JLabel {
    public StatusBar() {
        AnnotationProcessor.process(this);
    }
    @EventSubscriber(eventClass=StatusEvent.class)
    public void updateStatus(StatusEvent statusEvent) {
        this.setText(statusEvent.getStatusText();
    }
}

A similar project is ELF (Event Listener Framework) but it seems to be less mature.

I’m currently researching about event notification frameworks on Publish-Subscribe Event Driven Programming | Kev’s Spring vs Java EE Dev and the followup articles.