Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Application Blocks

While developing an application, even a very simple logic can be accomplished in variety of approaches. Finally it is up to how effectively or efficiently the logic is implemented. Whether it is a direct approach, has leveraged and squeezed much of the facilities of that programming language and architecture, can withstand and easily provide rooms for changes and enhancements, whether it is easily extensible etc…
In Software development, specific customer segments have common needs at a higher level of abstraction. The platform does not always directly support these without a lot of manual work.

Application Blocks are such code libraries which is build up on optimized design patterns against common programming scenarios which need to be done in almost every application. Thus it provides the platform suitable for a wide variety of application types and architectures.

A good Application block should :

Enforces consistent development patterns

Provide a good level of abstraction between the business logic and the common scenario which is implemented in the current application block, so that we can easily plug this into any application
Should provide extensibility points that let developers tailor the application block to suit their needs. The most common use of extensibility points is to allow developers to use their own providers
It should provide good performance
Provide proper kind of guidance regarding the implementation
So before development choose your appkication block wisely :)