Flex best practices – Part 1: Setting up your Flex project | Adobe Developer Connection

If you are willing to sacrifice the powerful tool set provided by Flex Builder 3.0 standalone or plug-in, applications can be developed using only the Flex 3 SDK.

The practices covered in this article should be followed regardless of which setup you use.

This is the first part of my series on using and applying best practices to your Flex development process. This article will focus on best practices for setting up your Flex project.

Why follow best practices? During your Flex development career, your hands will touch many projects. Not all projects will be created from scratch. More than likely you will be working on an established codebase that has been built up over time by different developers working in different stages of their careers. You will be facing projects that may have already begun or have already been released and now need to be refactored, changed, and updated. Time and time again, you will find yourself being thrown into the middle of the development process for various projects. Because of this, it is critical that the project has been started using best practices. Otherwise, you will be spending additional time making sense of the project and understanding the codebase rather than making the requested improvements or changes. This additional time can increase the cost of a project and dramatically detract from the task at hand. For these reasons, the Flex development community has established a set of common best practices for Flex developers to use. Following these best practices improves the clarity of a Flex project and enables Flex developers to focus on innovation rather than learning a myriad of nonstandard development approaches.