Even with the best practices mentioned in the preceding section, the idea of building a Flex application from scratch can be a bit daunting. Where should you begin? Sometimes too much freedom can be paralyzing. Artists often report that their greatest creativity stems from having boundaries. Likewise, you may find that having structure may provide the right environment for building a successful Flex application. This is the role of a microarchitecture.

Microarchitectures are intended to provide a general guideline and structure for building applications. A microarchitecture doesn’t deal with the specific requirements of a specific application, but rather concerns itself with a philosophical approach to how applications should be structured and designed in general. Microarchitectures provide these oft-needed boundaries and guidelines that help remove the paralysis you might otherwise experience. To that end they can be useful.

Various individuals and organizations promote many microarchitectures for Flex applications. A few of the more popular of these are as follows:

We don’t advocate the use of any one microarchitecture over another. In fact, we don’t really advocate the use of microarchitectures at all. Instead, we recommend that you find a system that works best for you. For the sample application, we are borrowing some of what we consider to be the best ideas from our own experiences building applications with Flex.

Although any one of these microarchitectures might be helpful and useful, don’t be surprised if it is limiting at the same time. The boundaries created by a microarchitecture can provide structure, but they are still boundaries. If you decide to use one of these microarchitectures, it is probably a good idea to follow the rules and build applications exactly as specified by the microarchitecture until you are familiar with the basics and have built several applications successfully. However, at that time you may find it useful to break the rules a little and adapt them to what works best for you. To really take our advice on this matter you’ll probably need to be fairly proficient with Flex and with basic design and architectural patterns before you even start working with a microarchitecture. That’s not because we think microarchitectures are “advanced” or “difficult.” Rather, it’s because we think that to be able to have a critical approach to using a microarchitecture (such that you can learn from the patterns without having to adopt the entire system blindly) you need to have a fair amount of Flex and application development experience first. For the sample application in this chapter, you’ll find that we’re not stressing that you must build your own applications using the same design structure we’ve used. Instead, we’re simply providing one example that uses patterns that we’ve found to be useful for Flex applications.