In my Javascript and Flex applications, users often perform actions that I want other Javascript code on the page to listen for. For example, if someone adds a friend. I want my Javascript app to then call something like triggerEvent("addedFriend", name);. Then any other code that was listening for the "addedFriend" event will get called along with the name.

Is there a built-in Javascript mechanism for handling events? I'm ok with using jQuery for this too and I know jQuery makes extensive use of events. But with jQuery, it seems that its event mechanism is all based around elements. As I understand, you have to tie a custom event to an element. I guess I can do that to a dummy element, but my need has nothing to do with DOM elements on a webpage.

Should I just implement this event mechanism myself?