Event-Driven Program

An event-driven program is one that largely responds to user events or other similar input. The concept of event-driven programming is an important one in application development and other kinds of programming, and has spawned the emergence of event handlers and other resources.

An event-driven program is also known as an event-driven application.

The idea in event-driven programming is that the program is designed to react.

It reacts to specific kinds of input from users, whether it's a click on a command button, a choice from a drop-down list, an entry into a text box, or other kinds of user events.

Other programming languages may feature user events that are largely delivered through a command-line interface or some other type of user interface. The opposite of event-driven programming would be programming that is written to act regardless of user input.

For example, display apps such as those for weather updates or sports scores may feature less of the event-driven programming that is inherent in other kinds of programs. However, nearly all software relies on user events for functionality, and it would be easy to argue that event-driven programming is the default for nearly all kinds of projects.

That's because, in general, applications and code modules are written to respond to human actions, which is part of the core concept of how humans work with machines. However, identifying event-driven aspects of programs can be helpful in design analysis.