Want a shortcut for subscriptions and notifying users about messages? We’ve found a way. Ember has built-in code for implementing the `pub-sub` pattern.
Today’s refactoring of a small part of our Ember app, responsible for connecting to PubNub to provide real-time updates, resulted in a discovery. We have a dedicated `pubnub` service to wrap up PubNub communication.
For subscribing and notifying all interested objects about new PubNub messages, we use the pub-sub pattern. For implementation, we relied on custom, simple functions inside the service:
import Ember from 'ember';
const { Service } = Ember;
export default Service.extend({
...
addListener(listener) {
this.get('listeners').pushObject(listener);
},
removeListener(listener) {
this.get('listeners').removeObject(listener);
}
...
// Then to notify listeners
this.get('listeners').forEach((listener) => {
listener(response.message);
});
});It turns out that similar functionality is already built-in inside Ember thanks to the Ember.Evented module. They only have different names: `on` / `off` instead of `addListener` and `removeListener`. But the idea is the same.
Refactoring the `pubnub` service boiled down to removing `addListener`, `removeListener` and extending `Ember.Evented`:
import Ember from 'ember';
const { Evented, Service } = Ember;
export default Service.extend(Evented, {
...
// Then to notify listeners
this.trigger('receive', response.message);
});We also had to replace our listener code for subscribing to events (simple `search & replace` within the project):
// Before
this.get('pubnub').addListener(callback);
this.get('pubnub').removeListener(callback);
// After
this.get('pubnub').on('receive', callback);
this.get('pubnub').off('receive', callback);Thanks to that, we decreased the number of custom code inside the service and leveraged Ember’s power. `Ember.evented` also allows subscribers to be notified about a single event thanks to `one`, and also implements the `has` method to check whether there are any subscribers for a specific event.
We are also able to use the same implementation for notifications about different events, i.e. `disconnect`, `connect`, etc.
Today’s Developers’ Notes were taken straight from the journal of Łukasz, our Web Application Development Team Leader. Keep an eye out for more programming tips and tricks in the future!
