Component Development Guide

Guidelines & Best Practices

There are two main pieces to a component – the component itself, and the configuration parameters that allow ad developers to configure the component to their specifications. It is important to understand how these two pieces fit together, and to design both of them in a way that makes your component effective, usable, and useful.

These two component pieces actually have very different audiences:

• The configuration parameters are used by ad developers and designers, who use them to configure the component’s functionality and appearance, and integrate it into their ad. For them, it is important to understand what each parameter means and how to use it, as well as to understand the big picture of what the component is designed to do, and what parts of it are and are not configurable.
• The component itself is ultimately consumed by end users, who see the component as an integral part of an ad they see on a web page. They have no concept of this being a component that is in any way separate from the ad. It is in large part the ad developer’s job to ensure that the end user's experience is seamless and enjoyable, but it is your job as a component developer to lay down the framework that makes that possible by making sound design decisions.

In this section, we discuss some design guidelines for both of these pieces, helping you design a best-of-breed component that is based on solid design principles and conforms to Flite best practices. We cover the following topics:

• General Principles: General component design principles, focusing on usability.
• Component Architecture: Designing the component’s functionality, control flow and appearance.
• Code Architecture: Best practices for writing readable, extensible component code.
• Parameter Architecture: Designing configuration parameters, including naming, appearance and layout.
• Component Packaging: Designing the component’s presentation to potential customers.