Summary

In this chapter, we discussed the development cycle of an object-oriented application. Even though this chapter covered various techniques for architecting an application and designing objects, consider this as an approach rather than a hard-and-fast formula.

Regardless of the language used, applications can be object-oriented or procedural. It is the style employed that distinguishes one from the other. Actionscript 2.0 has all the elements necessary to write truly object-oriented applications, but there is no object-oriented police preventing you from going astray.

This chapter provided you with tools that will help get the job done, but it is up to you to keep the following in mind:

• Object-oriented classes tend to have simple, singular responsibilities. Keep in mind that a good class does one thing and does it well.

• In OOP, you are thinking more about how classes interact than how to code them.

• Object-oriented development is architecture driven.

• The amount of time you spend coding is dramatically less than in procedural programming. A rule of thumb is 1/3 in analysis, 1/3 in design, 1/6 in coding, and 1/6 in testing.

• Object-oriented systems tend to be well organized, but procedural systems often end up as spaghetti code.

• In OOP, it's important to use abstractions, allowing the system to closely represent the real world.

• You know you are an object-oriented programmer when you don't have VB on your machine and you think Cobol is a shade of blue.