Professional Adobe® Flex® 3

Chapter 66. Modular Application Development

When building Flex applications, you may find it necessary to take a modular approach to the application architecture and components. If you're wondering what it means to have a modular application development approach, you're in luck. The goal of this chapter is to provide insight into what modular development is, why you would want to use it, and how it can be used in your Flex applications.

Overview

Modular development is an approach to software design and architecture that separates application components into separate logical components, or modules. Each module is a logical grouping of functionality, thus common logic and common tasks are bundled into the same module.

To get a better idea of what is meant by a module, consider an application used for software development and project management. The application could be composed of sections devoted to the following tasks:

• Tracking ongoing development tasks

• Requirements tracking

• Bug tracking

• Staff resourcing

• Reporting

• Administrative tasks

Each section of the application could be built into modules. They are self-sufficient and operate more or less independently of each other. A user could work in staffing and development work areas but never get into administrative or reporting tasks because the logic necessary to accomplish these logical tasks does not overlap.

For the portions of logic that do overlap, "common" code modules or libraries can be developed that contain logic that is shared throughout ...