Thanks for that clarification. I guess Alex was just sending us a link to a QA site. It’s a breakdown of how Flex is ordered in MVC. I’d be curious whether that breakdown is a reflection of how Flex (or Flex Builder) was actually constructed or whether it’s just a description of Flex in MVC elements. It’s hard to tell from short descriptions without a larger context.

Kindest regards,
Bill

I’m not supporting or opposing the opinion, just putting the link here for him, not in an anchor tag, so it shows up.

I’m not quite sure what your comment is about. It sounds interesting, though. Would you mind commenting further?

Thanks,
Bill

You’ve summarized a good deal of what we’ve been saying. Design Patterns are tools, and depending on the problem you’ve got in front of you, some are more applicable than others. The MVC is a special case for two reasons. First, it is not a design pattern, but it was introduced to show how classes can be loosely tied and interact. Second, the MVC has been widely used and misused, and its association with design patterns is so skewed, that it’s hard to find the way back to its original purpose—an illustration.

When in doubt, head for the OOD principles, and you’ll be in good shape. After all, remember that design patterns were originally offered to help maintain OOD and not as a solution in and of themselves.

Kindest regards,
Bill

I come from a totally different corner of the programming world – zero Java, C++, etc. Coming from the ‘Flash AS2 RIA’ world, I resisted the verbose and strict nature of AS3. But when I began using Flex2 & 3 and saw how incredible coding became with ‘real’ code hinting, robust debugging, and smart compiler (among many things, let’s me know that I need to import a class – thank you Ctrl+space), I became very excited about embracing coding frameworks and practices that earlier just seemed silly.

So I began studying frameworks. I saw the merits of the MVC model immediately. But most of my projects were MV. I would ask myself, “Should I try harder at finding a way to make my code fit the ‘C’ part of MVC”? The reality was that my data was on a server and therefore my ‘C’ was an ‘S’. Most of my controller work was being performed in my Service class.

How relieved I was to read Brian’s article. Being new to the whole OOP MVC world, I thought I was doing something wrong. Like waking up from a hard sleep, it just took me a little while to realize that Flex’s Event architecture and Databinding were handling much of the heavy lifting for me. Had I come from a Java background, it might have been clearer that a hand-coded Observer pattern wasn’t necessary in Flex.

**This is to any potential AS3 OOP/Framework authors out there. I have read 6 books on OOP/design patterns/frameworks and the book for Flex developers that hits the target on those topics hasn’t been writen yet! Many have made attempts, but that book just hasn’t been written yet. Just sayin’. As soon as someone can bring it all together from a Flex/AS3-centric viewpoint, I’ll be the first one in line.

The guys I talked with are not quite as rigid as some of us are. They’re always looking for better ways of doing things, and they’ve been around long enough to know that things change. Most were around before Design Patterns, some even before OOP. So for them, change is part of the nature of programming. By the same token, they don’t throw something out simply because it’s out of style.

For me, MVC has several logical and useful benefits, and the Pure MVC does as well. However, as Brian points out, some things done with the MVC may be more ritual than utility, and I’m glad he’s spoken up. It makes us stop and think, which is always a good thing.

Bill

By the way, I’m firmly in the “I don’t know MVC” camp myself…