Chapter 3. Defining a Design Strategy

After you've decided on the application you want to create and the method you'll use to create it, and have all the stakeholders and development team in place, it's time to work out a design strategy. A design strategy normally involves creating some type of application structure. You want to begin thinking about how the application is going to go together.

The first task you'll want to tackle is creating an object model. Objects can help you define any sort of real-world situation. The most common way to view application objects is as a computer representation of a real-world object. For example, if you were to model an apple as an object, the apple object would contain properties such as Color and Smell, methods such as Ripen, and events such as ChangeColor.

Application objects normally interact with some type of data, so the second step is to create a data model. You'll need to consider issues such as the data sources and define data classes to create a connection to these sources. Once you have a connection, you need other classes to read, add, delete, edit, and update the data content. The data model must encompass concepts such as data integrity and connection reliability.

The user has to have some way of interacting with your application, so the third step in defining a design strategy is to create a list of user requirements and then convert them into user classes. The user classes include all sorts of concerns, such as the layout of the ...

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