3 Chapter 1: Application Development Phases It is difficult to define the exact process that all Adobe® FlexTM developers use to build and deploy applications. However, the process typically involves five distinct phases: design, configure, build, deploy, and secure. Topics Design phase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Configure phase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Build phase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Deploy phase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Secure phase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Application Development in Flex SDK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Design phase In the design phase, you make basic decisions about how to write code for reusability, how your application interacts with its environment, how your application accesses application resources, and many other decisions. In the design phase, also define your development and deployment environments, including the directory structure of your application. Although these design decisions specify how your application interacts with its environment, you also have archi- tectural issues to decide. For example, you might choose to develop your application based on a particular design pattern, such as Model-View-Controller (MVC). About design patterns One common starting point of the design phase is to identify one or more design patterns relevant for your appli- cation. A design pattern describes a solution to a common programming problem or scenario. Although the design pattern might give you insight into how to approach an application design, it does not necessarily define how to write code for that solution.