A good design should be intended to guide implementation, not dictate it, and for good reason as in the real world of software development requirements and systems are far to complex and dynamic in nature to view a technical design as anything more than a basic prescription intended to form the basis of an efficient implementation. Yet far too often many people seem to believe that once a detailed design has been completed and approved implementation should be a breeze; however this is just not a very realistic expectation.

For instance, one of my core job responsibilities is to review technical design documents and provide feedback and direction. This is an iterative process which typically has between 1-3 iterations depending on the complexity of the system. Initially an engineer is given requirements for review; he/she then begins an initial draft of the design and once completed passes it on to me for review. I then review the document and provide feedback where applicable, either via annotations to the document itself or by sitting with the developer, which is by far my preferred process. Should modifications be required the developer will then make revisions as needed. This process is repeated until final design has been approved. At first it may appear as if only a single iteration of design and review would be needed, however more often than not, requirements may not be completely understood during the beginning stages of design, nor are they set in stone so it is very common that a design will need to change during the early stages of a project or even throughout the entire development stage. Once final design has been completed an engineer then begins implementing the design. Theoretically this may appear to be a quite simple process: create a great design which contains as much detail as possible, review it, make revisions and approve it, then just pass it off to any old developer to implement and that’s it, done - wrong!

There are a number of problems to this approach. Below I have outlined the three I feel are most significant and the solutions I have found to address each.

The above illustrates the three most common design issues I have encountered, most of which pertain to over detailed designs, as well as the approach I take in addressing each. If you have not encountered any of these issues in your own work than that is generally a good sign, however try to keep them in mind when designing as it will pay off in the end. The important thing to keep in mind when designing is to design for flexibility and simplicity. Less is usually more and the KISS principle, especially when applied to software design will always pay off in the end.

Most Flex developers are aware that mxml files are essentially declarative representations of ActionScript classes, that is, during compilation the mxmlc compiler generates ActionScript 3.0 classes from mxml files before being converted into bytecode that runs in Flash Player. This can be seen by setting the compiler argument -keep-generated-actionscript to true.

You may be thinking “yeah I know this, and…”, however in the past week I have had two talented Flex developers say to me: “but you can’t implement interfaces in mxml… Can you?”

Now if you think about that statement a bit more you will probably realize that you most certainly can, however it mat not seem so obvious at first as developers tend to think of mxml for what it is, a markup language and not necessarily from a compilation perspective.

So in case you are not aware how interfaces can be implemented in mxml I have provided a few simple examples below which demonstrate how a custom component can implement an interface, in this case mx.rpc.IResponder.

First you define the interface that the component will implement using the implements property of the component.

Next you simply implement the operations defined by the interface as you normally would in a class:

Now you may be wondering how multiple interfaces are implemented in mxml? This is very easy as well, simply specify the fully qualified class path of each interface as a CSV (Comma-separated values). An example can be seen in the following:

And that’s all there is to it.

Package-level function closures are very useful for creating generalized functionality which does not require a class (static methods) or instance of a class (instance methods).

Unlike static and instance methods package-level function closures are not associated with a class or instance of a class but rather with a package. There are no syntactical differences between package-level functions and static or instance methods.

Package-level functions are for the most part utility functions; for instance the flash.utils package contains a number of package-level functions, the most common of which are describeType(), getDefintionByName(), getTimer() and so forth.

Package-level function closures are created by defining a function directly inside the body of a package (where class and interfaces are defined), as can be seen in the following example:

Calling a package level function is straightforward, simply import the function just as you would a class or interface and then invoke the function directly…

Typically you will find that most functionality can be grouped to a Class or an instance object, however on occasion you may identify specific functionality which is common to packaged functionality as opposed to a specific object, and in these cases utilizing package-level functions is a great option.

Reflective programming is a very common, powerful, yet expensive software development practice. In most modern programming languages reflection can not be utilized to modify private members of an object, which is to be expected. However in certain circumstances, such as when developing very high level frameworks and automation APIs it may be beneficial at times to be have the ability to access private members of an object from outside of the public API of the class.

For instance, consider the following class definition:

The above class defines two private members: _username and _password. The public API of this class exposes these properties via the read-only accessors get username and get password. Per design assignments to these properties can only be made via the instance constructor.

So how can these values be modified once the object has been instantiated? More importantly, should this be allowed as the properties have not been publicly exposed? Theoretically they can not, philosophically they shouldn’t. All of this is debatable; however as a dynamic programming language ActionScript can easily accomplish accessing and modifying private members of an object which have not been exposed.

To do so is simple: define a method which provides an interface into the private members of the class instance, as in the following example:

The above example is pretty straightforward. It is simply a static method which requires 3 arguments. The first being the instance of the class, the second is the property in which to assign a new value, and the third is the value to assign to the property. This static method can be defined in any class and will work fine - you only need to change the type of the instance argument and error message to match the type of the class in which the method is defined. All methods in a class definition have access to any member of the class therefore assignments can be made to an instance of the class via a static method. This is possible in most object oriented languages such as C# and Java, however ActionScript takes this approach into the dynamic realm thus making it much more robust as the actual properties which are to be modified can be specified at runtime.

This approach can just as easily be accomplished on the instance level as well via an instance method, as in the following:

A client implementation for each would be as follows:

This approach is best suited for assigning values to simple types, or for pointing reference types to other object instances. This does not allow nested properties of a member to be accessed or modified (although it could easily be refactored to do so). Most importantly, (as you may be thinking) this breaks encapsulation and violates information hiding; therefore I do not recommend utilizing this approach for general use, however it is a convenient and efficient way to modify objects when developing complex APIs which use reflection and also for implementing Unit Tests directly against private members.

Initially I was introduced to the static implementation of this technique by a .Net developer on my team, and admittedly I was somewhat skeptical at first, however given the dynamic nature of ActionScript I realized this could open up some interesting possibilities under unique circumstances, similar to how mixins open up many possibilities - when used with discretion in a good design they both provide powerful advantages over other languages.

Food for thought. Enjoy.