IEF or ICE's Events Framework

Table Of Contents

• What Is IEF
• Quickstart
• Main Components
• Import To Your Project

What Is IEF

IEF is an events framework that is driven by the goal of helping you with building event-driven software in a clean and quick manner. The framework was originally created for my real-time chat project, but it was written with the intention to be reusable and to fit almost every software.

Quickstart

The framework is based on the publish-subscribe design pattern and the concept of topics. This document assumes you are already familiar with these concepts. If not, you can go read about them online.

Main Components

• Subscriber

  • Is an event handling interface each class must implement so its instances will be able to subscribe to topics.

• EventBus

  • Is the most important object which from you make most of the interactions with the framework. It provides a very simple interface from which you can subscribe to topics, unsubscribe from topics, create new topics, publish events to topics, and more. Use example:

    public class Player extends Subscriber {
        
        public static final String PLAYER_TOPIC = "Player";
    
        private String name;
        private int age;
    
        public Player(EventBus eventbus) {
          /*
          Creates new topic for the player so he will be able to receive event.
          */
          eventBus.createTopic(PLAYER_TOPIC);
          eventbus.subscribe(this, Player_TOPIC);
          
          /*
          We want to retrieve the player's data from the database 
          by publishing our custom event to the topic channel the 
          database is subscribed to (Or listenning to).
          */
          eventbus.publish(new PlayerDataRetrieveEvent(), Database.DATABASE_TOPIC)
        }
        
        @Override
        public void handle(Event event) {
          if (event instanceof PlayerDataEvent) {
            PlayerDataEvent e = (PlayerDataEvent) event;
            
            name = e.getName();
            age = e.getAge();
          }
        }
    }
    

• Event

  • In order to create custom events you must extend the Event class for each custom event class. Use example:

    public class PlayerDataEvent extends Event {
        
        private String name;
        private String age;
        
        public PlayerDataEvent(String playerName) {
          this.playerName = playerName;
        }
        
        public String getPlayerName() {
          return playerName;
        }
        
        public int getAge() {
          return age;
        }
    }
    

Import To Your Project

Unfortunately it is not yet possible to import it using Maven. But the project can be imported by downloading the JAR file I provide (IEF.jar) and then import it in your IDE.

• In IntelliJ: File -> Project Structure... -> Libraries -> '+' sign -> Java -> Locate the JAR file on you PC and import it.