When to use EventListenerList instead of a general collection of listeners

Question

When I learned how to fire events in Java, I became familiar with EventListenerList. When I create my own listeners, I write the listener so it extends EventListener, I store th

Answer 1

EventListenerList has a method, getListeners(Class t), specifically for the case where you are only interested in one event type.

Here's an example of how to use it:

protected void fireChangeOccurred(Change change) {
    for (ChangeListener listener:
         listenerList.getListeners(ChangeListener.class)) {
            listener.stateChanged(new ChangeEvent(this));
    }
}

If you choose to maintain your own collection of listeners, I recommend a CopyOnWriteArrayList.