Adobe® AIR™ Bible

Chapter 16. Application Design Best Practices

Best practices are conventions outside of the programming language itself that have developed over time and through experience to help keep your code organized and maintainable. They keep your project from turning into a mess.

Anyone who has been programming for very long is sure to have seen projects become messy, with the result being that the project becomes increasingly difficult to change or maintain.

A project can become messy for a number of different reasons, including poor planning, poor communication, unforeseen demands, or changing requirements. These sorts of issues are constants in the real world, but programming practices have been recognized and developed to mitigate the damage.

Mistakes are a fact of life; when you are orchestrating a complex system from the ground up, they're practically unavoidable. A successful programmer is not a person who can consistently write code without ever making a mistake. A successful programmer is a person who can write code that can easily be fixed when mistakes are made.

Now is the time to forgive yourself (and your associates) for any project you've ever worked on that became chaotic. Programming practices is one of the most discussed topics in the technology industry. This would not be the case if it were unusual for a project to become difficult to work on. Reflecting on past messy projects, and what could have been done to repair them, is your best tool to ensure that you avoid those ...