Una guía de trabajo con Plex

George Jeffcock, en su sitio relacionado con sus Stella Tools, dedica algunos párrafos a recomendar buenas prácticas en el uso de Plex. Coincidiendo con las guías de enseñanza usuales en Plex, George recomienda:

STOP Coding - Start Architecting
Plex development is essentially a three-step process involving Data Modeling, Pattern Matching and Customization. There are no shortcuts, each step must be adhered to achieve the goals. Missing a step may seemingly achieve a short term solution but in the medium and long term the solution will surely decay far quicker than it should have. The mindset required to use plex effectively is one of:

• Object oriented approach to application design to eliminate the need to code repeatable elements of applications
• Working at a level of abstraction rather than at the ‘nuts and bolts’ level, probably just saying the first point again but this can’t be over stressed the importance to think this way instead of coding procedural code line after line
• Model-based and pattern-based approach to increased application quality and flexibility
• Multiple inheritance is a key part of the way applications are developed in CA Plex therefore leveraging the full value of a site’s existing patterns
• Encapsulation so that function interfaces contain only the attributes pertinent to the use of the function
• An application should be separated into separate layers/tiers, Functionality should be strictly separated into data access, business logic and presentation logic, as this promotes the consistency of the application as well as the possibilities to reuse functionality.

La primera regla que un nuevo desarrollador en Plex debe asumir, es que debe escribir la menor cantidad de código posible: olvidarse de escribir líneas de código, y pensar, pensar el modelo de datos y relaciones, luego estudiar cómo abstraer y explotar patrones existentes, y sólo luego escribir código, sólo lo que es estrictamente necesario. "Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it"