Why use event listeners over function calls?

Question

I've been studying event listeners lately and I think I've finally gotten them down. Basically, they are functions that are called on another object's method. My question is, why create an event listener when calling the function will work just fine?

Example, I want to call player.display_health(), and when this is fired, the method player.get_health() should be fired and stored so that display_health() has access to it. Why should I use an event listener over simply calling the function? Even if display_health() were in another object, this still doesn't appear to be a problem to me.

If you have another example that fits the usage better, please let me know. Perhaps particular languages don't benefit from it as much? (Javascript, PHP, ASP?)

Answer 1

You might not always be in control of the code that's doing the calling. Or even if you are, you don't want to introduce dependencies into that code. In cases like that, it's better for the code to fire an event and allow the code you do control, or the code that should have the dependency, to listen for the event and act accordingly.

For example, perhaps you're creating a library that will be used by other people. They don't have the source code or in some way can't/shouldn't be able to modify it (or shouldn't have to). Your documentation states that specific events are raised under specific circumstances. They can then, in turn, respond to those events.

Or perhaps you have some domain libraries in your enterprise. You do control them and can modify them, but architecturally they're generally considered to be working as they currently are coded and shouldn't be changed. (Don't want to incur a round of QA to re-validate the updated code, the code belongs to another department and they don't want you to change it, etc.) And you're in the position where you want that code to be able to do different things in different circumstances/environments. If that code raises and event where relevant, you can hook your code into it (and/or swap out accordingly) without having to mess with that code.

Just a couple quick examples, I'm sure others have more.

Answer 2

In Brief, you can write the code without event listener, but using event listener help other to use the same code as library.