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Well it appears that I was little off in my predictions. By getting over 30% of the vote PureMVC has lead the way, with Cairngorm taking second place, and Mate coming in third. I have never used PureMVC but your votes have convinced me to give it another look.
Another thing that I really liked about this poll, was that I was introduced to two new frameworks that I had never heard of before.
Ruboss is a framework for easing the development of Flex/Rails applications. Their tagline is "Ruboss Framework: The RESTful way to develop Adobe Flex and AIR applications that easily integrate with Ruby on Rails".
GEMVC which stands for (Good Enough MVC) is a simple architectural framework for Flex that provides basic Model-View-Controller constructs for your applications. The basic tenet is that separating the Model (the data) from your views (GUI code) and your control logic (business logic and service calls that affect the model) provides for easier maintenance since you can modify one portion of the application without affecting the other.
As usual thank you for voting in our poll. Hopefully, you will try more than one of these frameworks as they all have their own uniqueness and accommodate the needs of different types of developers. My general opinion is that it doesn't really matter which framework you prefer as long as you use one. There is nothing worse than trying to support someone else's spaghetti code, so it is always nice to have a basic understanding of an application simply by knowing the framework that was used.
Also, be sure to look out for our upcoming series by Tony Hillerson which will explore and contrast Cairngorm, Swiz, Mate, and PureMVC.
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The main advantage that a framework gives you is that you have a prescribed way of implementing an approach, be it MVC or ViewHelper, or whatever.
I would recommend that any team about to embark on a project take a close look at what frameworks are available and weigh up if the benefits they will get from using an existing one will out-weigh writing their own or simply putting in place a convention and code-review process.
IMHO if you have quality, disciplined developers a good convention is that is really required. But a lot of people don't like to work to conventions and I imagine some of the more anal architects don't trust their developers enough to follow one, which is a sad case to start with.
Finally, I would say, if you use a a framework, don't do so just because it is "the defacto standard" or the latest cool thing. It is a good idea for one or more person in the team to keep abreast of what frameworks are available and then contribute to making the decision about which one to use, if any.
I didn't vote, but, I have to say, there's something I like about using a framework that the manufacturer gives visible support to. That is the main reason I chose to use Cairngorm. Cairngorm is part of Adobe labs, and they supply links and a forum for discussing its use.
Thanks.
I started a project with PureMVC and removed it. I recommend that people consider not using a framework at all. Flex is already a framework built on top of ActionScript and the Flash player.
Andrew: I think frameworks are useful where it makes sense. I am currently working on a traditional web development project (non-RIA) and have been looking at Flex to see whether it's a viable option for us. We have 140+ developers (it's a big project with 500+ web pages) and having a framework simplifies many tasks for them and also keeps them in line by standardizing how functionality is implemented. This way we keep the "look and feel" the same and maintenance becomes way easier.
Again I understand projects like this one are not the norm.
Chris and Rich: We're considering writing our own framework built on top of cairngorm, as we want many services provided to developers that are currently not implemented in any of the frameworks posted above. This way the different common features we need can be built the same way, across all 140 developers, without having 140 different implementations of it.
@Andrew:
Maybe if you could give us a reason you removed PureMVC, it would be more helpful to the discussion. In my experience, it takes a developer a certain amount of experience and knocking your head against the wall before you really understand the value of a framework.
I just used PureMVC for the first time for a flash project and thoroughly enjoyed it. One thing that any framework should provide are conventions. I built my application faster because I didn't have to worry about how I was going to accomplish some task "this time." The way to do most everything has been tested and proven. You can spend your time doing because you don't have to wonder what's really the best way.
I use PureMVC before I'll use Cairngorm because there are less steps to accomplish the same thing. It also helps to have a unified framework for both flash and flex applications. I'm trying to move my organization to PureMVC because we span many projects and many clients. If we had a unified way of doing this work, it would allow us to switch developers between projects and be able to easily pick up where another has left off.