Designing in a modular way

In the early stages of designing an application, one of the most important steps is to decide on the functionality that the application needs to provide. This of course, is based on the overall purpose of the application and the type of application that you are designing.

Based on such requirements, in the design phase, you should try to break down the overall functionality (the big picture) of the application into smaller and specialized pieces. Then, you can determine if such pieces already exist, either in the form of third-party libraries or the code that you have already written for a different application.

If you already have your own chunks of reusable code designed in a modular fashion (most third-party libraries are designed in such a way too), it would be much easier and quicker to connect these pieces together and use them in your new application. This would be the same as putting various Lego blocks together to create a play structure.

This type of approach is very important and fits quite well within an Agile development environment. This enables you to work on well defined, specialized modules as you need them and as new application requirements are defined. Also, as you create your code based on modules, you are able to prevent tight coupling among your application pieces.

On the other hand, this approach allows different developers to work on different pieces (modules) of the same application, independently of each other. Another advantage is that modules can be tested separately and in different environments before being added to the application.

In time and with more experience in modular application design and implementation, you will become better at deciding how to distinguish and design your modules. However, it is not realistic to think you can come up with the complete list of all the modules that you could ever need in your application, in the first attempt.

That is because applications evolve and requirements change over time. You may need to create new modules, or modify current ones, or decide to use a different module or library altogether to accommodate such changes in the requirements.

The key advantage of modular design is the flexibility that is provides. Dealing with all the situations mentioned above is a lot easier and requires a lot less effort in a modular architecture. It will also mitigate the impact that adding, removing, or modifying a module could possibly have on the application as a whole.

In the following chapters, you will see how we can create simple and complex modules and how they will be added to our application as loosely coupled pieces.

You will also see how we can load such modules dynamically and on demand when we need them in our application.

So, let's get ready for an exciting journey into our future application design, using modular architecture.