Comments on: Large Applications for impatient developers

By: Derrick Grigg

Derrick Grigg — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 19:02:10 +0000

I completely agree on breaking up a large application into smaller modules that only get loaded as required but the user. It makes no sense for an application that has many views and modules to force a user to download the entire package when only a small portion of that may be all they use. I have been using that approach with RIA’s since Flash 7 and it has always worked very nicely. Can’t wait to get a copy your book once it comes out.

By: Anatole Tartakovsky

Anatole Tartakovsky — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 13:19:02 +0000

Marco,
Breaking your application in two independent units will help some people, also canonic approach with interfaces will help some to use components as black boxes. In the end of the day with these approaches you end up with :
1. Large build
2. Need to load all components on the startup of the application.
While describing the above techniques, the book is more in a favor of different incremental approach – developing core application and pluggable modules allowing you to develop and deploy pieces independently. Think of very specific case for larger enterprise applications of 1-100MB in size – where even loading complete application at once is not an option, not to mention that 10-100 people have to work on it relatively independently – and then scale it down and up – you would see architecture a bit differently.
Regards,
Anatole

By: Marco Casario

Marco Casario — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 12:53:13 +0000

In order to break large flex 2 applications into logical and smaller pieces, another tips should be to create external MXML Components designed as “black boxes”.
I worte an article about this topic that will be published on this month’s issue of WDDJ : http://casario.blogs.com/mmworld/2006/08/developing_loos.html

best
marco casario