events vs callbacks (was Re: SAX2 (was Re: DOM vs. SAX??? Nah. ))

[Gabe Beged-Dov]

David Megginson wrote:

> Gabe Beged-Dov writes:
>
>  > SAX is described as an event-based API. IMO, it is a callback based
>  > API.
>
> Event-based programming existed before people started encapsulating
> events in structures or objects.  I'd define SAX as an event-based API
> that reports events using callbacks.
>

There are various axes to use for terminology (as many of the threads on
this list
show :-().  To reuse a term from the previous sentence, I would say that
the key axis to use to distinguish event-based vs callback-based is
"thread" of control. A callback-based API passes the thread of control to
the "message" receiver. A event-based API queues the "message". The
receiver uses its own thread of control to process the message.

The current crop of parsers and frameworks (SAX, MDSAX) are definitely in
the single threaded camp. The discussion of streaming (in other threads
:-), has only brought up multiple threads of control tangentially, in one
response that discussed wanting to hand off the processing of a "packet"
to another process in a high volume server scenario.

There is alot of discussion of data models vs API. I would like to see
control flow added to the axes that people argue about :-).

Gabe Beged-Dov
www.jfinity.com


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