Professional Adobe® Flex® 3

Chapter 60. MVC Frameworks

When building Adobe Flex applications, you'll often find it necessary to organize your application components into consistent architecture. The architecture dictates how each component will interact with the other components and data, and how information is exchanged between the application and the server.

This chapter examines Model-View-Controller (MVC) frameworks at a high level. The following sections examine the MVC paradigm, what a framework is, and why you would want to use an MVC framework. These sections will also go in depth into what each component that creates an MVC architecture should do.

This chapter will not cover any Flex frameworks or code in detail. Later in this book, you will find several chapters devoted to Cairngorm, the Adobe-sponsored MVC framework.

What Is MVC?

MVC is an architecture, or paradigm, that divides your application into separate logical components: the data model, the user interface (view), and the controller. We'll dive into greater detail on MVC components later in this chapter, but this should be enough to get you ready.

In the simplest of terms, a framework is a structure used to solve a complex problem. When applied strictly to computer software, a framework is the set of core logic, classes, and design patterns that create the structure of your application. All components of the application rely on the framework structure to function correctly. Frameworks typically consist of a common set of libraries and design patterns ...