Flight Framework: Overview

The Flight Framework is an Application Development Framework for developing web and desktop applications in Flash and Flex. The framework prescribes a Model-View-Controller workflow that minimizes the complexity of application development. It modularizes domain logic, streamlines team development, and creates a natural iterative programming environment. Most importantly, Flight Framework is designed to make your day to day coding experience as simple and enjoyable as possible.

Approach

Flight is a minimalist. Everything from its size to its prescribed processes ensure that you never have to do more than is absolutely needed. But it’s not a skeleton of interfaces either, offering robust solutions such as built-in undo/redo and custom process queues. And Flight was designed to be extended, built on interfaces and abstract classes, and offering ready-made plugin capabilities on your own libraries.

Methodology

The Flight Framework prescribes a common structure and methodology that can be leveraged throughout all tiers of your application. By understanding its basic principles you will gain command over the development of your applications, libraries, and those built by others using the framework. Flight takes a modular approach to the widely adopted Model-View-Controller as its basis of organization.

Domains

A Flight application is made up of a series of one or more MVC modules, or domains. Each domain under Flight represents a specific business domain, or a real-world set of related problems and solutions. Domain examples are infinite and range anywhere from a user account to an entire shopping cart, from an application’s screen flow to a full image-editing library. These MVC subsystems are defined by you, reflecting your application goals, and are unique to their specific purposes. Some domains are completely self-contained and are reused across many projects, while others have dependencies among each other or the application. Domains can even be organized hierarchically, a high-level domain wrapping a group of sub-domains, for greater modularization and manageability of a complex system. Though a powerful tool, domains are simple enough and easy to approach in development. In Flight, well-defined domains will be the strength of your application development.