Is it OK to use 'window' as an event bus in jQuery?

Question

I've been playing around with jQuery's Events methods and I built a simple event bus with the following code:

$(window).on('test:event', function (event, data) {
    console.log('Saw a test event: event=%o, data=%o', event, data);
});

$(window).trigger('test:event', {test_data: 'foo'});

My question is, are there any problems with using 'window' to manage the events?

Answer 1

Yes, this is a great way of using the power of custom jQuery events outside of the context of DOM bubbling. But it can also be done more efficiently (without querying the DOM, since that's performance-expensive and unrelated to the requirements I assume), by using an empty object {} instead of the window.

Ben Alman wrote a great jQuery plugin for managing events in this way that eschews some of the irrelevant jQuery events elements while using the same principle to achieve a lightweight Publish / Subscribe pattern (listen for and trigger events defined by strings, with optional extra arbitrary data passed between).