Programming Flex 3

Abstracting Common Patterns

Like all software, Flex applications are complex. This requires that developers building Flex applications are able to solve architectural and design problems rather than simply throwing together a bunch of off-the-shelf components. Using a microarchitecture as described in the preceding section can help in this regard. However, when using a microarchitecture you can solve only the problems that the microarchitecture is specifically designed to address. If a problem falls outside that scope, the problem remains unsolved. In this manner, it’s perhaps more useful to at least understand some of the common patterns that are used to solve problems. You can then utilize these patterns either as part of or apart from a microarchitecture.

Many papers, articles, and books have been written about design and architectural patterns used in software development. The patterns that you could use when building a Flex application are too numerous to list and detail in this chapter. However, a few patterns are common enough that we would be remiss not to describe them. Notably, nearly every Flex application could profit from the use of the Model-View-Controller pattern and the Business Delegate pattern, both of which we’ll discuss in more detail in the following sections. Additionally, we’ll start by looking at a pattern for dealing with browser integration, which is a problem that is unique to web-based applications.

Understanding Browser Integration

Shortly we’ll look at ...