ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns

3

Chapter 1
CHAPTER 1

Object-Oriented Programming, Design

Patterns, and ActionScript 3.0 1

Let it be your constant method to look into the design

of people’s actions, and see what they would be at, as

often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the

more significant, practice it first upon yourself.

—Marcus Aurelius

The life history of the individual is first and foremost

an accommodation to the patterns and standards

traditionally handed down in his community.

—Ruth Benedict

At the lowest cognitive level, they are processes of

experiencing, or, to speak more generally, processes of

intuiting that grasp the object in the original.

—Edmund Husserl

The Pleasure of Doing Something Well

The idea of design patterns is to take a set of patterns and solve recurrent problems.

At the same time (even in the same breath), the patterns reflect good object-oriented

programming (OOP) practices. So, we cannot separate OOP from design patterns,

nor would we want to do so.

In answering the question of why bother with design patterns, we are really dealing

with the question of why bother with OOP. The standard response to both design

patterns and OOP often points to working with a team of programmers and speak-

ing the same language. Further, it’s easier to deal with the complexities involved with

programming tasks requiring a division of labor for a large project using an object

metaphor and practices.

In addition to coordinating large projects, programmers use both OOP and design

patterns to deal with change. One key, important element, of design patterns is that

they make changing a program much easier. The bigger a program and the more

time you’ve spent developing it, the greater the consequences in making a change to