Implementation

There are many ways to implement a Chain of Responsibility in Python, but my favorite implementation is the one by Vespe Savikko (https://legacy.python.org/workshops/1997-10/proceedings/savikko.html). Vespe's implementation uses dynamic dispatching in a Pythonic style to handle requests (http://j.mp/ddispatch).

Let's implement a simple, event-based system using Vespe's implementation as a guide. The following is the UML class diagram of the system:

The Event class describes an event. We'll keep it simple, so in our case, an event has only a name:

class Event:
     def __init__(self, name):
         self.name = name

     def __str__(self):
         return self.name

The Widget class is the core class of the application. The parent aggregation shown in the UML diagram indicates that each widget can have a reference to a parent object, which by convention, we assume is a Widget instance. Note, however, that according to the rules of inheritance, an instance of any of the subclasses...