ActionScript Developer's Guide to PureMVC

Chapter 4. Implementing the User Interface

The classes making up your user interface should encapsulate their own behavior and appearance. View Components may require data or the occasional method invocation from the outside in order to have something to display or to know they need to change to another visual state. But they should be capable of making those visual transitions themselves once given the input and impetus. When they have something to communicate to the rest of the application, they should do this solely by dispatching events or setting properties and making method invocations on their child components. In the context of a PureMVC application, a View Component should never know anything about the PureMVC framework classes or their subclasses.

One reason it is a good idea to build the View Components after building the Value Objects, and before getting deeply into the PureMVC apparatus, is that you do not yet have the ability to access those Mediator, Proxy, and Command classes since they have not yet been created. Since we have already created our Value Objects and Enums, we can populate our View Components with dummy VOs as we build them without having to have all the rest of the system in place to feed them to us. In fact, you should be able to farm out the development of the View Components to a separate company, team, or team member that knows nothing at all about PureMVC and still be successful. If the team is at another company, you might want to repackage your ...