Building websites and web animations with Adobe^R Flash^R and ActionScript^TM is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what you can create with the Flash and ActionScript combination. When you are working on a complex project such as a desktop application, you need to consider design and architecture. This book by Joey Lott and Danny Patterson will take you through the steps for building a flexible and adaptive application. As you can tell from the topic, the reader needs to be an advanced user who has a solid background in programming and experience with object-oriented ActionScript.

The book begins with an introduction to application design principles and follows with a discussion of the most proven design patterns for building flexible and adaptive applications. First, the authors discuss Polymorphism and how important programming to an interface is to application design. Next, the authors use an example project to teach the Model View Controller pattern. The sample project is an analog and digital clock model which demonstrates how changing the model from analog to digital does not affect the application due to the flexibility of the design. The next pattern the authors discuss is the Singleton design pattern that can be used to limit a class to one global instance, such as the state of the mouse cursor.

One task that many applications need to perform is to access a remote resource such as an external image file or to use an object that is not immediately available. The authors discuss the two most common proxy patterns used for this situation; Remote and Virtual. The two sample projects they use are an image loader and search proxy. Another common task is dealing with a collection of data and the authors discuss the Iterator pattern which can read data without endangering the data structure. Another frequent task is to deal with hierarchical data such as a file system. The authors use a file and directory system as a sample project to demonstrate how to use the Composite pattern. Many times, Flash applications are based on reusable components and the authors discuss how to use the Command and Memento patterns to build a sample game. They round out the book with a few advanced ActionScript topics such as events, sending and loading data, E4X and regular expressions.

Joey Lott is an author of several books and Senior Software Architect at Schematic. Danny Patterson is an author of several books and articles. He is a Senior Flash Architect at Schematic and a Flash/Flex consultant.