Checked out TurboSignals by Jackson Dunstan today. Please stop sending me this link over and over again.
I see a lot of people don’t understand the point. “ZOMG IT’S ZILLION TIMES FASTER I MUST USE IT EVERYWHERE!!!!1″. No you don’t. Everything should be used where it fits. I saw a lot of people started using architectural frameworks like PureMVC or Swiz without understanding the theory behind them. Thus inventing hacks to overcome framework “constraints” while what they see as “constraints” come from their lack of knowledge.
A lot of people think that if something is advertised as being good and fast they must use it in their projects. STOP NOW! Think first if you really need all this stuff.
Same here. I am absolutely happy with Events and I love all sort of bubbling. Events are good for UIs and tree-like structures. I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I just work with events everywhere in the same manner.
BUT! If I need greater performance somewhere in critical code chunks I’m using simple function calls. I know that I create obvious dependencies but I do it where it makes sense. You should not rush to change Events to Signals or whatever everywhere. Inventing hacks and making your app impossible to maintain.
Check out TurboSignals sources, there are like 20 lines of code which do stuff. You could implement such interface-based notifying yourself.
What you really should do is to read the whole Jackson’s blog. You’ll find a lot of information about AS3 optimization and stuff. Good job, man!
Your post is spot-on! No one should rush to use TurboSignals or, for that matter, any other library. TurboSignals has definite pros and cons, many of which I spell out in my introductory post. You point out some good ones too, like the inconsistency that TurboSignals will create in your project due to the fact that you cannot change the Flash API, which heavily uses the Event/EventDispatcher system. Think about this kind of drawback and ask yourself whether or not it is worth it to you, your team, and your project to introduce TurboSignals (or other libraries) because it is definitely not always worth it. For TurboSignals in particular, the library is built for the purpose of speed. Do you even need speed? If your app is a weather widget, probably not. Do you need more speed out of your events/signals system? For most apps, probably not. TurboSignals is for applications that legitimately need more speed out of their events/signals system or prefer its syntax to the alternatives.
In conclusion, I agree: don’t rush into TurboSignals or any other library.
I’ve been snooping around for this thread for a while from you. I was sure it was around, just needed to take a look around ;) Finally lucked upon it, handy! I’ll ensure to subscribe to the RSS feed from here on it.