Previously, I offered some thoughts in response to “What is XOA?” To recap, experience-oriented architecture indicates an approach to solution design that is about the customer in, not the underlying systems out. I mentioned the concept of experience components in the Adobe® Digital Enterprise Platform (ADEP) as a concrete expression of XOA for Flex developers, noting that XOA is, in fact, technology agnostic.

Now, let’s talk in more detail about UX Components.

Adobe CEM applications use a component model that is oriented toward reuse across a spectrum of applications. At one end of the spectrum we have static applications where individual components are statically linked into an application. At the other end of the spectrum, individual components are placed in a catalog on a server and dynamically injected into an application at runtime. We call these “experience components”–UX Components.

Technically speaking, a UX Component is a combination of MXML and ActionScript classes that is bundled into SWC files that separate concerns and encapsulate each concern behind an interface. Interfaces make the implementation of concerns (i.e. presentation, domain, etc.) replaceable and extensible.

The fact that a UX Component is well-composed behind a set of interfaces, allows you to focus on the concrete implementation of familiar coding patterns productively.

For example, let’s assume that the domain model and service integration specified by Adobe for a UX Component is well-suited for your use case, but in order to differentiate your customer experience, you need to implement a custom user interface. By leveraging UX Components in ADEP, you simply focus your attention on implementing a custom view and presentation model that will leverage everything as-is:

Another common requirement involves integrating existing systems into new customer experiences. Depending on your use case, you may be satisfied with a UX Component as provided by Adobe. So, you need only focus on implementing a custom façade to ensure that customer interaction with your experience is integrated with your existing infrastructure:

Here is an example of a UX Component:

At the top is a logo component and a navigation bar. The left column has a calendar, and the right column has resources finder and a document viewer. Each of these components are very generic displays of information. For instance, the project calendar is a graphical list of items, actually a tree of items that is rolled up into a Gantt chart. Each of these items has a start date, finish date, phases, a current state shown in color and descriptions.

A UX Component is completely independent of its data source. Simply by injecting a data source at runtime and providing a different skin, a different application experience can be delivered:

Here is the same calendar UX component, with a new skin and a new data source. This shows a charcoal theme, and the data is a product development plan rather than a marketing plan. The renderer for each of the items now shows the phases of the project as colors in the bar.

By creating a well thought out UX Component, where concerns are inheritable, skins are replaceable, and services are injectable, ADEP enables you to achieve a high level of reuse while providing both richness and consistency in the experience.

More on ADEP‘s Composite Application Framework (pka Mosaic) and Client Component Framework (pka Gravity) in future posts…

Update 7/6/2011: “What is the Client Component Framework?“