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What is EventBinder?

GWT's EventBus is great - it allows you to write maintainable GWT applications by decoupling the components of your application, making them easy to add, modify, or remove. However, using EventBus in GWT can require a lot of boilerplate in the form of implementing events, defining handler interfaces for them, and implementing those interfaces all over your code in anonymous classes. EventBinder automates away these boring details using a strategy similar to the @UiHandler annotation defined by UiBinder.

How do I use it?

Easy - just define your event, register handler methods for it, and then fire it.

Defining events

With EventBinder, events are just immutable value types extending GenericEvent. If your event doesn't have any arguments, defining it only takes one line:

public class SaveClickedEvent extends GenericEvent {}

To create an event with arguments, just create a normal Java value type:

public class EmailLoadedEvent extends GenericEvent {
  private final String subject;
  private final String body;

  public EmailLoadedEvent(String subject, String body) {
    this.subject = subject;
    this.body = body;
  }

  public String getSubject() { return subject; }
  public String getBody() { return body; }
}

That's it - no need to implement getAssociatedType or dispatch from GwtEvent or to define handler interfaces.

Registering event handlers

Event handlers are methods annotated with the @EventHandler annotation. It works the same way as @UiHandler - the name of the method is ignored, and the argument to the method is checked to determine what type of event to handle. In order to get this to work, you must also define an EventBinder interface and invoke bindEventHandlers on it in the same way you would for a UiBinder. Here's an example:

class EmailPresenter {
  interface MyEventBinder extends EventBinder<EmailPresenter> {}
  private final MyEventBinder eventBinder = GWT.create(MyEventBinder.class);

  EmailPresenter(EventBus eventBus) {
    eventBinder.bindEventHandlers(this, eventBus);
  }

  @EventHandler
  void onEmailLoaded(EmailLoadedEvent event) {
    view.setSubject(email.getSubject());
    view.setBody(email.getBody());
  }
}

After bindEventHandlers is called, onEmailLoaded will be invoked whenever an EmailLoadedEvent is fired on the given event bus.

Firing events

The last step is easy and doesn't require anything special from EventBinder - just construct an event and fire it on the event bus:

eventBus.fireEvent(new EmailLoadedEvent("Hello world!", "How are you?"));

Firing this event will cause all @EventHandlers for EmailLoadedEvent in the application to be invoked in an undefined order. That's it, you're done!

How do I install it?

If you're using Maven, you can add the following to your <dependencies> section:

    <dependency>
      <groupId>com.google.gwt.eventbinder</groupId>
      <artifactId>eventbinder</artifactId>
      <version>1.0.0</version>
    </dependency>

You can also download the jar directly or check out the source using git from https://github.com/google/eventbinder.git and build it yourself. Once you've installed EventBinder, be sure to inherit the module in your .gwt.xml file like this:

    <inherits name='com.google.web.bindery.event.EventBinder'/>

Where can I learn more?

  • For more details on the EventBinder API, consult the Javadoc.
  • Check out the sample app for a full example of using EventBinder.
  • For general advice on architecting GWT applications, see this video and this document