Cliff Hall - ActionScript Developers Guide to PureMVC

Too often in the development of a large application, the developer must stop and think about where to find some class he needs, where some new class should go, and how to wire them up in such a way that gets data from wherever it lives to a display so the user can interact with it or vice-versa.

Regardless of the high level complexities in your application, you will never truly be doing anything more involved at the lower levels than moving data from point A to point B and occasionally doing some calculations on it. You should not have to keep inventing ways to do it; instead, your energy should be focused on the requirements of your current use case.

PureMVC is a simple framework that helps reduce the amount of time spent thinking about these low level issues by providing solutions for organizing your code and an expression of the well known Model-View-Controller concept based on several time proven design patterns.

Not only can it help a lone developer get her work done faster, but a team that is all on the same page about where things go and how they talk to each other within the application can move fluidly as they implement use cases in parallel. This is actually possible without creating the spaghetti code that often occurs during the heat of development. And since PureMVC is a mature, feature-frozen framework, legacy code written this way becomes much easier to maintain since the organization and implementation principles remain as valid as when the code was originally written.

As the author of the framework, I have had the good fortune to remain engaged more or less constantly from the time it came out, applying it to one challenging project after another. I have also had the pleasure of talking with a great many other developers around the world who have shared gems of wisdom or worked through their problems with me. I want to try and convey the most important bits, of course, but in a holistic manner and within the context of a non-trivial application.

There is a wealth of discussion about the details of development on the PureMVC website as well as documentation, demos, and utilities. There are plenty of community blog posts about building small demo apps, but up until now, nothing has taken a developer through the process of building a non-trivial PureMVC application, giving a sense of how all the pieces need to fit together and in what order to approach building them. From rough conceptualization of an application to the finished product and all the steps in between, you will gain the insight to know which responsibilities need to be handled by framework actors and, just as importantly, which do not.