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I have started a series of posts on Flex from a ‘ground up’ perspective. View the series by clicking the ‘Flex Series‘ tab above. The URL’s to these articles won’t change, but the titles, text and examples will evolve (so be careful linking and quoting). The goal of the series is to establish a resource of Flex best practices specifically related to application structure and coding practices ((specifically not dealing with server side technologies nor GUI design)).

If you have suggestions for topics or feel that something could use another perspective or elaboration, please leave comments. I really appreciate involvement from the Flex & AS community. Continue reading for a list of assumptions that this series will make …

Versions

This series of posts currently targets Flex 3, AIR 1.0 and ActionScript 3.0. When new versions are released, a new series will be started with relevant new examples.

MVC

It is assumed that the reader has some (at least a mild) understanding of Model View Controller as well as (and most importantly) a desire to structure applications this way.

Application Structure

The structure of your applications will conform to the standards of the structural framework that you employ. As of this post, the most popular options are Cairngorm, PureMVC or Build Your Own. The posts in this series will assume the use of a popular structural framework. I will attempt to remain unbiased although the majority of my experience is with Cairngorm.

Server Environment

It is a good practice to write applications that can easily adapt to a changing server environment. This means that if you switch from PHP to .NET or XML to AMF or MySQL to PostgreSQL, the application itself should require very little change, if any at all. This is accomplished by exposing a consistent API to the application while dealing with server communication in one centralized place. All examples in this series will behave this way so that adapting them to your environment may be as simple as possible.

What’s next?

View the series by clicking the ‘Flex Series‘ tab at the top of the page.