Infrequently Noted

Last night I checked in our first port of the NW codebase to use signals and slots for almost all event mechanisms. I'm sure someone is going to get rather annoyed that in 3 major releases, we will have changed the event mechanism twice, but I honestly beleive that it's a step and a half in the right direction.

Which begs the question "what in the hell are signals and slots?"

The CS-ish answer to that question is that signals and slots are a mechanism for anonymously connecting function calls. A better explination would be to illustrate signals and slots in terms of a mailing list system. A mailing list system lets people sign up for lists, and when something gets sent to a list everyone that has "subscribed" to the list gets "notified" of the event. Sig-slot works almost exactly the same way, in that I can "connect" to functions or object methods and when I "emit" an event (call the function) everything that's signed up to listen for that event gets told (called with the same arguments).

Ok, but what good is that? Well, for interface development it's very often the case that I want to create a generic widget, for instance a button. When I roll my own button widget and handle all events for the button internally in the button object, I can tie it's behaviours to it's programatic context very tightly, which is to say that when it gets clicked I can tell it to call function foo() without any ambiguity: the button instance keeps an internal table of function pointers that it needs to execute when it gets clicked on and the button instance manages adding and removing pointers from the table with a set of methods which may be specific to the button widget. That's ok, but it requires that the thing connecting to the button be very aware of the interface the the button widget exposes to do this. Whole (sucessful) toolkits have been built this way and there's nothing wrong with it. But it has some obvious drawbacks, not least of which is a lack of consistency.

One way of improving the situation is to provide a more abstract way for two things to connect to each other that's not dependent what two methods are being connected. So when, say the button's onClick() function gets called something else can get notified of that action without having to interface with the button instance directly. In essence, making the connection between the two functions/methods anonymous. Using anonymous connections spares the writers of widgets from writing entire function pointer registration and firing routines which consist of error prone code that may or may not provide a consistent interface. Using sig-slot to implement this anonymous connection provides a rather elegant subscribe-notify model that can be used across an entire class of software, making things consistent and managable for developers.

I'm sure I'll babble more about this soon.