New features including: SignalBindings, Sets and more...

[Simon Richardson]

Hi all,

Luckily I've had some free time to implement some of the features that Robert has had in the TODO list[1] for version 0.9. This is an open discussion about the following features that I've implemented or am implementing at the moment.

• SignalBinding as described by Joa Ebert (you can read more here[2]). This concerns the ability to have a binding that is returned when you do an add, addOnce and remove (etc). The way that Joa had created the new internal faster SignalBindingList making it very easy to change what was internal from the developer perspective and then make ISignalBinding external. I've written a few unit tests to help make this feature robust enough to use in production, but would like people to give me their thoughts on this and if people get time to test it out that would be great also.
• Sets are away to automatically give you access to native events without the need for constructing the whole NativeSignals for yourself[3]. All the native signals are created lazily, so in other words if you don't use them they shouldn't have any performance overhead. I've started to implement the display object classes first and I've started to implement unit tests around them. There are a lot of tests to perform on these so it's taking longer than I'd hope.
• SingleSignal which you can read about here[4], but one important thing that does need discussing is that the difference between a SingleSignal and the rest of the Signal family is the way SingleSignal handles adding twice. SingleSignal will throw an error if you try to add more than one listener. This is the default way currently as I didn't want developers to suddenly try and work out why the old or new listener they added didn't fire because it's a SingleSignal and only one signal is fired.

If anybody has any thoughts on this, then please let me know and if anyone gets around to testing this out then any feedback would be appreciated.

[1] https://github.com/stickupkid/as3-signals/blob/master/TODO.textile

[2] http://groups.google.com/group/as3-signals/browse_thread/thread/248ad2305b92dfce?hl=en

[3] https://github.com/stickupkid/as3-signals/blob/master/src/org/osflash/signals/natives/sets/NativeSignalSet.as#L17

[4] http://www.simonrichardson.info/2011/03/31/singlesignal/

Cheers

si