ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns

Gentle Reader: This is one of those posts that begs for comments. It is partially tongue-in-cheek, so don’t get overly excited. However, since we do both produce products and provide services using OOP and design patterns, I thought it worth a cursory glance.

I’ve been refactoring a movie player/message board originally developed following the Where’s Waldo School of programming. It tucks ActionScript 2.0 in the Timeline in multiple frames, buttons, movie clips and God knows where else. The reason it’s an interesting project is because of excellent graphic design that I’m trying to maintain. Anyway, it’s almost done, and I was wondering whether refactoring using ActionScript 3.0 design patterns is a service or product.

When Services Became Products

Reading about the current economic meltdown in The Economist and watching the economic experts on TV, a couple of things became clear: (1) The major financial institutions have no idea what assets they have, and (2) a lot of the problems were caused because the assets were “re-packaged” into other “products.” Things became so convoluted that people like Bernard Madoff were able to buy and sell nothing to the tune of $40 billion and the SEC didn’t have a clue even when presented with evidence of a Ponzi scheme.

In order to avoid a similar meltdown in OOP programming, I thought it would be a good idea to ignite a discussion about the work we do and differentiate services from products. To begin, I thought I’d start with a list of products and services that seem to be pretty clear:

When it comes to design patterns, things are not quite as clear. If you build a house, you can easily point to building materials (wood, nails, cement, shingles) and services, getting all the permits required to build a house (meeting building codes, inspections). The guy hammering in nails is building a product and the gal doing the inspection is providing a service. Using design patterns, you don’t see anything in the product.

If I’m programming a video player, I’m creating a product. I may use a button or slider component (other products), but at the end of the day, I’ve got a product in the form of a video player that plays videos. In terms of whether the product is high or low quality is moot insofar as whether it’s a product or not. In the same way that a tree house build by kids or a house built by professionals is a product, a good or bad program is a product.

Refactoring: Creating a New Product or Servicing an Old One

At some level I’m convinced that if the financial institutions had used clearer language we wouldn’t have the problems we do now. Someone in marketing decided that customers would rather purchase a “product” than a “service” and started calling financial services, products. We shouldn’t make the same mistake.

In refactoring my current project, I’m doing everything I can so that the player has the same look. However, not even a single statement of the original player’s code is left. (All of the original code was consigned to the Eighth Circle of Hell along with the pimps, corrupt politicians, thieves, sowers of discord and Vista.) So, essentially I have a product that looks the same and has the same functionality but is wholly different inside. It glimmers with OOP and design pattern principles. However, when someone plays it, they cannot see a difference.

Where the real difference comes in will be when someone decides to update the player. It will be as easy as pie. They can change the videos, the content of the text that accompanies the different videos without having to touch the original code except in the Client whose requests have to be adjusted to reflect the new content. (Change in the old player would require demolition reminiscent of imploding a Las Vegas casino.) So in one sense the refactoring into design patterns and good OOP is a service to fix up an existing product. However, it can also be seen as a wholly new product because it behaves differently when it is updated.

I suppose it doesn’t matter whether you call refactoring a service or a product, but some thought the same thing of financial services—and none of us wants what happened to them happen to us. So, help save the world of ActionScript 3.0 OOP/Design Pattern computing and let’s hear your comments.

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