Well, me and one of my developer friend were recently jolted for a rather supposedly abuse of OOP; frankly to an addiction of some sorta geeky-ness in the Flash Development front. A veteran Flash developer commented and suggested, “make more use of the controller. You seem to take a lot of functionality out of the Controller and keep it in the View classes which respond to Model changes. In a way it’s the right way to program OOP but as far as making it a logical way for future developers to work with your code it makes it take 10 times as long to find functionality that could just as easy sit in a controller class.”
There are lots of truth in that looking from a Flash development perspective. Me and my friends have been recently, thus, thinking a lot on the way we work, code and structure applications and trying to mend our ways before it takes a back-stage and start living in our own castles. I know we will come out of the cocoon, learning from it and perfecting our future adventures; and yes, here is a rather apt article, “Object Oriented Programming Oversold!“, for this threatening moment.
While you are there, you may click the other topic for your reading pleasure “Why I Prefer Procedural/Relational Over OOP“ and “OOP versus Rational“.
Brajeshwar posted this article
on Sun, Apr 4th, 2004 at 7:23 pm
Categorized under Technology
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[quote]
make more use of the controller. You seem to take a lot of functionality out of the Controller and keep it in the View classes which respond to Model changes
[/quote]
the thing is the seperation between view and controller as in classic mvc/mvp isn’t really necessary, and especially in Flash/ActionScript… where your view and presenter/controller are essentially tied to the movieclip.
i follow a Model/UI archi (as in java’s Swing), with the UI dealing with both controller/presenter and view methods, and I find that a ton simpler and cleaner.
granted, there could be (and in fact are) special cases where the separation makes sense, but for the most part, the supposedly loose coupling created as a result of separating them is just a facade… you just create a set of extra (and i’m even tempted to say uneeded) methods, which are inherently tied to the original methods in the veiw, in the controller/presenter.
as to the merits of OOP/OOA&D… well its been belabored enough; i’m yet to hear anything that even comes close to being an argument… everyone who dabbles in our world, uses OOP/OOA&D and knows what he/she is about knows it is effectively a primitive in itself used to achieve other ideas such as those espoused in design patterns and the like. you also know OOP makes broad use of procedural/relational ideas… how else could methods/behavior be realized? as programmers we have to deal with the idea of ‘primitives’.OOP allows us to redefine what primitives are on a per program/project basis.
if u do real OOP/OOA&D, you know what you’ve got… and you know it’s good … if procedural works for you, by all means, stick with it… not only that, write such articles as “OOP Oversold”… don’t forget to add the exclamation mark… who knows? you might even generate a good following
eokyere
Hi Brajeshwar,
I’m also at the point where I want to establish ‘best prectices’ before I rewrite all of my stuff. And I’ve had my doubts about the utility of OOP in Flash. It seems to create a lot of extra work. But then again, AS1 had its drawbacks too.
Having read through the various articles you linked to (“OOP Oversold”, etc.), I was intrigued by the concept of ‘Table-Oriented Programming.’ But frankly, I have no idea how it would work in Flash. Do you?
You mentioned that ‘you and your friends have been thinking a lot about the way you work, code and structure applications.’ What have you come up with? Does Table Oriented Programming factor into it? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Thanks for the thought-provoking articles.
Jim Kremens
jimkremens@reelscore.com
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