I'm working on an application that uses the JavaFX event system
extensively, and I'm finding it quite hard to use common code for
event handler registrations.
The problem is that the `EventTarget` interface contains no
addEventHandler/removeEventHandler methods, and as a consequence of
that, code that uses `EventTarget` ends up requiring lots of brittle
instanceof tests to call these methods on all the different
implementations of `EventTarget`.
There are three buckets of `EventTarget` implementations:
1) Implementations that declare the following methods:
<T extends Event> void addEventHandler(EventType<T>,
EventHandler<? super T>);
<T extends Event> void removeEventHandler(EventType<T>,
EventHandler<? super T>);
<T extends Event> void addEventFilter(EventType<T>, EventHandler<?
super T>);
<T extends Event> void removeEventFilter(EventType<T>,
EventHandler<? super T>);
--> Node, Scene, Window, Transform, Task, Service
2) Implementations that declare the following methods:
<T extends Event> void addEventHandler(EventType<T>, EventHandler<T>);
<T extends Event> void removeEventHandler(EventType<T>, EventHandler<T>);
--> MenuItem, TreeItem, TableColumnBase
(Note that the EventHandler argument ist parameterized as
EventHandler<T>, not EventHandler<? super T> as in the first set of
methods.)
3) Implementations that don't declare any methods to add or remove
event handlers:
--> Dialog, Tab
I think the situation can be improved by promoting the bucket 1
methods to the `EventTarget` interface, so they can be used
consistently across all implementations of `EventTarget`.
This works seamlessly for bucket 1 and bucket 3 implementations.
With bucket 2, there's the problem that, inconsistently, the
EventHandler<T> argument is not a lower-bounded wildcard.
Unfortunately, a method with an EventHandler<T> parameter cannot
implement an interface method that expects EventHandler<? super T>.
However, since the erasure of the method remains the same, changing
the method signature would technically be a binary-compatible change.
Do you think this is a useful improvement?
