What's the best way to structure this kind of remote service?

Question

I'm not sure if this is technically a web service or not but I have a Flash file that periodically needs to make a round trip to a DB. As it stands, AS3 uses the URLLoader class to exchange XML with an ASP.NET/VB file on the server. The aspx code then goes to the DB and returns whatever information is requested back to the Flash file.

As my program grows and I need to execute a larger variety of tasks on the server, I'm wondering if I should just keep placing functions in that same aspx file and specify in AS3 which function I should load for any given task. OR, is it better to break up my functionality into several different aspx files and call the appropriate file for the task?

Are there any obvious pros and cons to either method that I should consider?

(note: I have put all of VB functions on the aspx pages rather than the code behind files because I was having trouble accessing the i/o stream from the code behind.)

Thanks.

T

Answer 1

When you are saying you need to execute a large variety of tasks you should think about breaking the code down into multiple files. Though this question cannot be answered in general and the solution is always specific to the problem this might help:

Reasons to keep all code in one file on the server side:

• Code for different tasks heavily depends on each other
• Effort for separating the tasks into files is too high
• The variety/count of different tasks is manageable
• You are the only developer
• Every tasks works correct and is fail safe (Since they are all in one file I assume one error will break all tasks)

Reasons to separate tasks into different files:

• The file is getting too big, unreadable and unmaintainable
• Different tasks should not depend on each other (Separation of concerns)
• There are multiple developers working on different tasks
• Many new tasks will be added
• A task could contain errors and should not break every other task

That is all I can think of right now. You will sure find more reasons for yourself. As said I would separate the tasks as I think the effort is not too high.