Agile Enterprise Application Development with Flex

Chapter . Building an Enterprise Framework

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

—Rich Cook

There is no such thing as perfect design. The Flex framework is evolving, and we are grateful that software engineers from the Flex team made this framework extendable. Because this book covers the use of the Flex framework in enterprise software development, we will identify and enhance those components that are widely used in business RIA.

For the majority of the enterprise applications, development comes down to a few major activities:

• Creating data grids

• Working with forms

• Validating data

• Printing

If you, the architect, can achieve improvements in each of these areas by automating common tasks, application developers will spend less time writing the same mundane code over and over again. The key is to encapsulate such code inside reusable Flex components, to create smarter components that can be collected into libraries.

Chapter 1 reviewed such architectural frameworks as Cairngorm, PureMVC, and Mate, which mainly helped with separating the code into tiers, but now you’ll learn how to build another type of framework by enhancing existing Flex components. Specifically, this chapter demonstrates how to build a framework that radically simplifies creation of data entry applications by:

• Identifying common reusable components, which ...