Extending the Application Framework

Summary

This chapter covered a topic that has a very wide scope, since component-based applications can be designed for almost any purpose one may think of.

You have learned how a good organization of several different aspects can act synergically, eventually increasing a developer’s efficiency and productivity dramatically.

Although some of the aspects in completing an application are too specific to be treated in a book, you have been given guidelines and techniques that allow you to integrate those aspects with the features that are to some extent present in the design and development of every component-based application.

By reading this chapter, you ended up with a set of best practices and a component-based template that encapsulates them. In particular, you have learned how to

• Take control of the loading process in component-based applications, determining when classes and exported symbols are loaded.

• Define the structure of a Flash document that properly compiles and initializes the components’ symbols and their classes before they are generated dynamically.

• Define a folder structure capable of managing several applications, their shared subsystems, and their themes efficiently, and at a low cost of maintenance.

In the second part of the chapter, you learned the basics of developing an application based on an XML layout engine and the benefits that come with it. Many of those benefits depend on mastering the use of XML within a component-based application framework.

The next chapter will show you how to take full control over XML parsing in order to be able to extend the framework by adding new features to existing components or even expand it by adding support for brand new components.