Understanding and implementing Event-Driven Communication in Front-End Development

Have you ever thought or needed to create a way to share data and actions among different users who are browsing the same website or web application? For example, creating a chat application or allowing collaboration on a document or project in real time.

This is possible thanks to event-driven communication, a technology that allows you to send and receive messages between the browser and the server asynchronously and decoupled. With it, you can create more interactive and collaborative web applications, which respond to data changes instantly.

In this article, I will explain what event-driven communication is, how it works, and how you can implement it in your front-end applications using JavaScript.

What is event-driven communication?

Event-driven communication is an architectural pattern that involves sending and receiving messages between components or services in an asynchronous and decoupled manner. That is, in an event-oriented application, there is usually an event loop that waits for the occurrence of events and, when detected, triggers a callback function associated with that event.

An event can be anything you want, as long as it’s relevant to your application. For example, an event can be a click on a button, a change in a form, a purchase made, etc.

The components or services that send events are called publishers, and those that receive events are called subscribers. They connect through an intermediary called a broker or event bus, which is responsible for distributing the events to the appropriate subscribers.

How does event-driven communication work in frontend?

In front-end development, event-driven communication can be used to synchronize data and actions between different sessions or web pages of the same site or application. This allows you to create features such as chat, real-time collaboration, notifications, multiplayer games, etc.

To implement this communication, you need to use a library or service that provides an API to send and receive events between the browser and the server. The goal is to allow the server to send events to the browser without it having to make constant requests.

Using event communication with SuperViz

SuperViz offers a Real-Time Data Engine that allows quick setup of an event-driven communication with a few lines of code. This makes the implementation easier, making the process more simplified and efficient.

With the Real-Time Data Engine, you need to create a room where all the participants in it can sign up to participate in real-time events. To create a room and add the Real-Time Data Engine, do as in the code below:

import SuperVizRoom from '@superviz/sdk'

const room = await SuperVizRoom(DEVELOPER_KEY, {
  roomId: "A shared ID of the room",
  group: {
    id: "Id of the group",
    name: "Name of the group",
  },
  participant: {
    id: "ID of the participant",
    name: "Name of the participant"
  },
});

const realtime = new Realtime();
room.addComponent(realtime);

To be able to listen when an event is fired, it is necessary to subscribe through the subscribe method, which triggers a callback function whenever an event is received.

realtime.subscribe("event name", callbackFunction);

function callbackFunction(payload) {
    // do something
}

With this, whenever there is a need, events can be sent from one participant to others using the publish method, specifying a name to identifies the event and a payload with the data about the event.

const payload = {
    id: 108,
    message: 'Hello World!'
}; 

realTime.publish("event name", payload);

Conclusion

Event-oriented communication in front-end development allows the creation of interactive and collaborative web applications. SuperViz and its Real-Time Data Engine simplify this implementation, facilitating real-time messaging and collaboration on projects.

It also provides a suite of components such as Mouse Pointers, Who-Is-Online and Contextual Comments that already implement the Real-Time Data Engine.

Start exploring the benefits of this technology with SuperViz by creating an account and getting a token for free.