This is another fairly dense technical piece. If you were hoping for diversion or scandal, sorry. It is a companion to my caching in trees piece from a few days ago.
For interactive displays, the Fitz display tree will follow a Model/View pattern. The model is the tree, and the view is a rendering module that renders the tree and displays it on the screen.
What happens when you change the tree? If you wanted the simplest possible implementation and didn't care about performance, you'd re-render the tree from scratch, and display that. But I do care about performance, and I am willing to sacrifice some of that simplicity for "minimal updating". At root, this is the realization that, if you have the rendering for the old tree in hand, then to get the rendering for the new tree, you may only need to do a small incremental computation.
Let's look at minimal update in more detail. A deep optimization running through much of Fitz is culling based on bounding boxes. Changes to an object are guaranteed not to affect rendered pixels outside the bounding box (note that effects like drop shadows don't fit neatly into this category; thus, they're not directly supported in the Fitz imaging model). So, if you change an object, a reasonable approximation to the update area is the union of the old and new bounding boxes. If you delete or insert an object, just the one bounding box.
However, for some objects you may be able to do better. For example, when dragging one corner of a semitransparent rectangle, the minimal repaint area may be L-shaped. In this case, repainting the entire rectangle would be wasteful.
One more performance issue: if the tree is very large, then the cost of having one "event listener" per node could be too much. Keep in mind that the only justification for all this is performance. If you add complexity and make other aspects of performance (like memory usage) worse, then it's probably not a win.
So the broad outlines of a change notification system begin to suggest themselves. If the tree is small, then having an event listener on each node is reasonable. Changes to leaf nodes are distinguished from changes to tree structure. The former are dispatched first to a change handler for the specific leaf type. The fallback is the bounding box approach. Changes to tree structure also invoke the bounding box method.
However, as the tree grows larger, you only attach event listeners to some nodes. It's a type of cache. For nodes that have no event listeners attached to descendants, you expect a notification any time a descendant changes. Otherwise, you only care about changes to the node itself, because you know other listeners will handle the rest.
So now we have the concept of event propagation. For at least some kinds of listeners, you want to bubble the event up the tree until you hit a listener. In the extreme case, you can have just one listener at the root of the tree.
Now I face a difficult design decision. If I want to have multiple Views of the same Model, event propagation gets trickier. In particular, the propagation patterns for different Views can't interfere with each other. You can't simply stop bubbling an event upwards when you hit a listener, because maybe another View has their listener further up. Bubbling all the way to the top isn't very satisfying either, because that will tickle the listener at the root even if a deeper listener has already handled the change.
There are a bunch of other hacks that don't work so well either. You could, for example, check to see whether a deeper handler has already been called, and ignore the notification if so. But you get into trouble if you want to aggregate several changes together into one notification. Keep in mind that if you change most of the nodes in the tree, then re-rendering from scratch is almost certainly better than doing an incremental computation for each node changed.
If you did have a good solution for the one-View case, then you could extend that to the multi-View case by having an "event group" for each listener. When a listener catches an event, it sets a bit so that other listeners with the same event group farther up the tree don't get called. But the complexity is unsatisfying.
That said, let me present one reasonably simple approach supporting multiple Views. Here, the tree implementation does just bubble events all the way to the root. It's up to the client (the View) to apply the event propagation logic. At an internal node, if you have listeners for all children, and if the node itself is unchanged (meaning no insertions or deletions at that node), then you can ignore the notification.
However, there is one unappealing aspect of this approach. If you want to add more listeners (say, after they've been thrown out of the cache), then it only makes sense to add listeners to all children of a node. If you only add it to some, you can't reliably ignore the notification, so you might as well not add it to any. I expect that the fanout may be quite large, so this could be a problem.
So far, I haven't been able to come up with what feels like the Right Answer, only different tradeoffs. Right now, restricting the thing to one View seems like the best tradeoff. For Fitz, I think this will very much be the common case. But for other, more general tree applications (particularly those involving networking), it's probably not good enough. It would be nice to have a general solution that was simple enough to be practical for Fitz, but I guess I'm just too incompetent to come up with one. Ah well, such is life.