Is PRISM meant for large scale application development ?

Question

I am developing a silverlight application for the past 6 months using prism framework. When I look at the code base now it has grown huge with lots of modules, event aggregators, inter module communication code etc. On hindsight I am contemplating whether I made the right choice. Is there any other simpler framework I should have gone for ?

Answer 1

Hi,

Prism is at its best when targeting a large application. Why? Because the core concepts Prism provides, such as Modularity, UI Composition, support for MVVM, etc. are used the most in this kind of applications.

The idea, as you said, is that you are likely to end up with a bunch of modules. The benefit of that is that your application is decoupled, and modules can be tested in absolute isolation so they are easy to maintain.

By using Prism, or any other library/framework that modularizes your application, (correctly) in large applications, you don't need to go through your entire application looking for bugs when you make a change to one of the parts. This is not true in monolithic applications, where making a minor change might bring down the entire app.

Another plus for Prism in this scenarios is that it allows multiple teams to work on different modules simultaneously, without affecting each other's work. This is specially useful when working with distributed teams.

The thing that would convince you of making the right choice, would be comparing the application you created with the same one but with high coupling of its components.

I hope this helps