Inter-component Communication and App Design

[re_buchanan]

I've been working seriously on learning Ext JS for about a week now and it's mostly coming together pretty well for me. But I'm a bit stuck on figuring out how to pass events around (or, perhaps, how Ext passes them about); in other words, how to do inter-component communication. I've read both Writing a Big Application in Ext (Parts 1 & 2) and I've studied Saki's Ext Example. So far as I can determine, the key bits in his example are as follows:

tpl:new Ext.XTemplate('<tpl for="links"><a class="examplelink" href="{href}">{text}</a></tpl>')

(add a custom classname to the items whose events I want to capture so that they can be "identified" later)

        
this.linksPanel.on({
             scope:this
            ,render:function() {
                this.linksPanel.body.on({
                     scope:this
                    ,click:this.onLinkClick
                    ,delegate:'a.examplelink'
                    ,stopEvent:true
                });
            }
        });

(I really have no understanding of exactly what this is doing, but it seems to be the key to getting the 'linkClick' events out to the parent)

,onLinkClick:function(e, t) {
        var title = t.innerHTML;
        var tab = this.tabPanel.items.find(function(i){return i.title === title;});
        if(!tab) {
            tab = this.tabPanel.add({
                 title:title
                ,layout:'fit'
                ,activate:true
            });
        }
        this.tabPanel.setActiveTab(tab);
 
    } // eo function onLinkClick

(this is, obviously, what is ultimately handling the events)

So here are my questions:

1. What exactly is happenning in the 2nd snippet above?
2. Is this the only way to do interprocess communication?
3. Is this the best way to do interprocess communication?
4. Are there any other Examples, FAQs, Posts, etc. where I might find more info on this topic?

Thanks,

Ron

Thanks

[mjlecomte]

I think the key thing to take away is that of "Observable" or events. You don't call methods directly, instead you subscribe and publish events. By using events you don't break your app just because the implementation changes. Think of the analogy if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to here it, does it still make a sound?

So snippet 2 above is adding a listener (the "on" is the same as addListener). So you're saying I want to listen to X. When X occurs do Y. Sometimes you may just want a particular Component to listen to something and then do something. Other times you may want to centralize the observations (application wide monitoring).

[re_buchanan]

Thanks for the response. I think I pulled the trigger early when I posted this: shortly afterward I was continuing to look around for info on this topic and came across quite a bit on Observable, PageBus and other info about message buses. Nonetheless, I appreciate your reply as it confirms that Observable is the path I most likely want to follow.