Best practices for a large application

Question

I have an existing application that is written in character
based Oracle Developer and has many forms and reports. A few years
ago I converted an inquiry portion of the system to standard ASP,
this portion has about 25 pages. Initially I want to rewrite the
Inquiry portion in Flex (partly to teach myself flex), but
eventually (soon) I will need to convert the remainder of the
application, so I want a flexible and robust framework from the
beginning.
So far for fun I wrote a simple query and I like what I have
done but I realized that trying to write the entire application in
a single script with hundreds of states would be impossible. The
application is a fairly traditional type app with a login script, a
horizontal menu bar and panels that allow data entry, queries and
reports. In Oracle and ASP each "panel" is a seperate program and
is loaded as needed. I see advantages in this approach, and would
like to continue it (creating as much reusable stuff as possible).
So where can I find documentation, and or examples on the
best practice in laying out a framework for what will eventually be
a sizeable app?
BTW, what about the ever present problem of writing reports?
Paul

Answer 1

As a matter of fact, modules are exactly what you're looking
for! :)
Flex's doc team has a good intro document here:
http://blogs.adobe.com/flexdoc/2007/01/modules_documentation_update.html
And this gentleman has a quick example in his blog:
http://blog.flexexamples.com/2007/08/06/building-a-simple-flex-module/
The app I'm working on now is primarily based on modules, and
they're a good way to keep things organized and keep loading times
low. Documentation on them has been so-so, but its getting better.
There are little undocumented gotchas that you'll undoubtedly run
into as you develop, but they've been covered here and in the
flexcoders Yahoo group time and again, so you'll readily be able to
find help.
When creating a module, you can either place them in the
project that they'll eventually be used with, or create a stand
alone project just for that module (the preferred and more
organized method.) Creating a stand-alone module project is easy:
just change the "mx:Application" tag in your main mxml file to a
"mx:Module" tag instead.
If you're using Cairngorm as your app's framework, you'll
have to tinker with things a bit to get it all working smoothly,
but its not that hard, and I believe the doc team is working on a
definitive method for using modules in Cairngorm based apps.
Hope this helps!