1st Question in our Coaching Program

Posted by Franto on August 20th, 2008

Main data carrier in big application - E4X XML or designated data class?

Hi my friends,

I have a question about software architecture:
Imagine you have an application that load data about many persons from XML and process / utilize that data all across the application. In AS2 there will be no doubt - I will parse the XML and create ‘id’ sorted array of Person class instances. But in AS3, where sophisticated E4X XML is available I hesitate. Should I use designated data class or dispatch pieces of XML all across the application?

  • What are advantages and disadvantages of both approaches?
  • Is it even common to dispatch pieces of XML across application?
  • Is even my terminology correct? (I am not sure whatever ‘data class’ is the proper term)
  • Can you point me to some resources about modern AS3 architecture?

Thanks!
Daniel

This is first question in our Coaching Program. :) We are happy, that it has started :)

And here is answer…

Hello Daniel,

thanks for being our first paid member and for placing your first coaching question :)

Now let’s move to your questions..

The software architecture approach definitely depends on the scale of the project. None of the approach is completely wrong if it works as expected and at the same time it’s flexible, maintainable and scalable..

But in general I would not recommend to use XML data structures throughout the project code as you have described. Not speaking about the great advantage of using E4X it would still not be too scalable because when anything in your data needs to be changed then you will have to modify your code accessing XML structures at many places.

More better approach is to separate your data from your functionality and just use centralized Data Model within your application. This Data Model can just serve as a storage of all data and also represent the state of your application being implemented as a Singleton class…

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