Guidelines for Flash application development

Jul 25, 2006

I just came across a really good article by Andrew Guldman on Flash development. He covers off all the major points for Flash development, including:

• Organization and preparation
• Good coding practices
• Code reuse
• Team development
• Application deployment

These ideas can be (and should be) applied to any Flash project; website, widget or RIA.

The only point I'm not real comfortable with is the section covering autogenerated movieclips. I understand the rationale behind the concept, I just do not personally like to leverage undocumented features that could go away or easily change in future Flash releases. My preference is to always have a library instance of any class that incorporates a visual piece, it is a little more setup time, but having them all in the library makes it easy to quickly find any visual pieces and it provides some consistency in that all visual pieces/classes are always represented in the library. It is a neat idea though, you can read more about it here.