Webmaster Forum / Flash / General Flash Topics / February 2006

Hi all.  Since most of us have basically started developing everything in .as
files, and classing things to be used over and over again, the question entered
my mind about using global variables and if people are still using them...and
if so....where, when and how.  So I figured I'd post this and see what all of
you think.

My past, and probably stupid approach, in the past was to have lots of global
variables that would contain all of the information I could ever want from
within my application.  This affords a developer a lot of help in those sticky
situations where it's so nice and easy to just stick the result in a global
variable and be done with it.   I would gather all of the user's information
from a single db call and stick all the information into a dozen or more global
variables.  I haven't found anything specific...so I'm guessing here but it
appears as though this contributes to problems in 3 major areas in Flash
application development:

1.  Increased memory usage of the app
2.  Really easy to break if you add/modify the app and forget about updating
the globals
3.  Probably not looked on kindly in the OOP world

My own new approach over the past year has been to write classes for obtaining
that information and calling it whenever you need it.  So for example if you
need a user's SSN part way through an app, you can just have a class called
"getSSN" in your security.as file and call it when you need it.

Now, I even question myself with this type of approach because the first
method seems so much simpler.  Call a single "info gather" db call right during
login and store everything you need...why complicate things with a class
instead of using a global variable to store the SSN?

Maybe someone can tell me what they have done with using global
variables...now don't get me wrong...I still have globals and use them in
situations where warranted, but certainly not as much as in the past.  I'm
wondering also if someone has any concrete stats or info that proves that the
use of a lot of globals does in fact increase the memory usage of the app and
slows down your app.  Am I off my rocker?