>When you create a component you don't get a handle to it. Consequently, components cannot be referenced by other components and cannot become properties of the global object tree. This is by design. Components do not engage each other directly; instead, they broadcast their actions as events which are subscribed to by other components.
This is a maintainability nightmare. I've gone down this route on hand rolled JS frameworks before and it leads to untold headaches. Sometimes a little coupling is the right solution. Many times it is better for components to have knowledge of their environment. In most applications (other than iGoogle maybe) one thing on a page depends on another. I feel it's far better to explicitly call out those dependencies by having a reference to the other components and directly invoking methods on them with known arguments of a known type.
Edit: Also, what kind of memory allocation implications are there with event subscriptions and no references to the components themselves?
This is a maintainability nightmare. I've gone down this route on hand rolled JS frameworks before and it leads to untold headaches. Sometimes a little coupling is the right solution. Many times it is better for components to have knowledge of their environment. In most applications (other than iGoogle maybe) one thing on a page depends on another. I feel it's far better to explicitly call out those dependencies by having a reference to the other components and directly invoking methods on them with known arguments of a known type.
Edit: Also, what kind of memory allocation implications are there with event subscriptions and no references to the components themselves?