Six ways to keep your Flex project on track

Posted on February 8, 2010 | No Comments

At the beginning of a new year, I couldn’t help looking back to the past year and see what I have accomplished. I became a full-time where do you buy viagra | buy cialis phentermine | cheap levitra online freelance developer in 2008. It gives me the freedom to do what I love, but it also comes with the responsibilities of managing customers and projects. So here is a summary of what I have learned in the past year,

1. Spend time to firm up the project requirements. This applies to any developer whether you are a freelancer or not. IMO, the difference between a good developer and a top notch developer is how well they manage customer expectations. Without solid requirements, you don’t stand a chance when it comes to expectation management
2. Keep the number of features down. Clients (or your boss) always ask for more features then necessary. A project complexity can go up exponentially when you add up the features. Sometimes, you just have to re-evaluate the client’s needs and push back on unnecessary features
3. Separate design and development. Nothing gunk up your Flex code faster then mixing styling code with application logic. As the Flex developer, some times you have to do both the design and development. You just have to be careful to keep in styling information in the CSS, not in your Flex code
4. Use BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services. Although there’s some ramp up time to learn these server-side products, the benefit will be enormous down the road. This blog contains a few articles on data service that can get you started. Just look into the tutorial section
5. Use patterns, not frameworks. I have nothing against MVC frameworks such as Cairngorm or PureMVC. The problem is a lot of developers use these frameworks without fully understanding the underlying patterns, thinking the framework is a shortcut to better architectures. Joe Berkovitz has an excellent article on pattern based Flex development
6. Research before reinventing the wheel. The Flex community is very vibrant and open. A lot of developers build usefully components and release them as open source projects. The FlexCoder mailing list is also chock-full of code snippets that can help you out. Before starting a project, do some research to make sure you are not reinventing the wheel

Category: Flex 3
Tags: Tips & Tricks

Author
By Sameera Thilakasiri
,is a front-end developer based in Colombo, is a blogger and a lifestyle photographer.
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