Comments for New Poll: Which Flex Framework do you currently prefer? (http://www.insideria.com/2008/11/new-poll-which-flex-framework.html)

New Poll: Which Flex Framework do you currently prefer?

2008-11-03T18:54:25Z

Last week, we asked about AJAX frameworks so this week, lets see how you feel about Flex frameworks. My assumption is that Cairngorm is still the preferred framework of Flex developers, but I have been surprised before. If you review the list of choices, (Mate, PureMVC, Cairngorm, Swiz) you may notice some that you haven't seen or used before. Fear not, we have an upcoming series of articles written by Tony Hillerson titled "FrameworkQuest 2008" that will cover each of the frameworks listed in our poll question. This series will launch later this month.

To vote in our poll, please click here.

Also, in a related note, we have published an article today by Sean Moore titled "Exploring the Strategy Design Pattern" which although is not a fully fleshed out framework as those in our poll question, the concepts could be used in coordination with one of them.

Comment from Andy Edmonds on 2008-11-03

2008-11-03T20:03:40Z

How about adding EasyMVC?

Comment from Rich Tretola on 2008-11-03

2008-11-03T20:48:27Z

@Andy

EasyMVC has been added, how could I forget Simeon.

Comment from Todor Kolev on 2008-11-03

2008-11-03T21:09:15Z

For those who are interested in the effectiveness of different frameworks you can see this article from my colleague Vladimir Tsvetkov:

http://npacemo.com/wordpress/2008/10/03/introduction-to-flex-applications-architecture-part-3-the-gugga-approach/

He suggest an approach that is proven from our practice to be very effective.

Comment from Karl on 2008-11-03

2008-11-04T05:36:21Z

I found Cairngorm to be overly complex and in a lot of ways, a square wheel.

For example, why do I need to raise an event that gets handled by a front controller and routed to a command? Why not just invoke the command directly? The front controller pattern is trying to claim that keeping all of my commands in one place is agile. Actually, by removing the command's invocation from its natural context, I found myself spending a huge amount of time trying to remember where the source code related to the event was. After I finally found the correct code, I was trying to remember what I wanted to do with it. Overkill.

I also disagree with using the command to move data between delegates and the model. The object model should represent the semantics of the application, and encapsulate calls to persistent data. Yes, the delegates should be decoupled to allow for different data sources. But, from the command object's point of view, the requirement of invoking both the delegate an the model independently is poor encapsulation.

Lastly, the model locator pattern is an "atrocity." See the link below, which I totally agree with:

http://blog.iconara.net/2008/04/13/architectural-atrocities-part-x-cairngorms-model-locator-pattern/

Comment from Peter Armstrong on 2008-11-04

2008-11-04T23:49:52Z

Can you add Ruboss too? It's a Flex framework which makes it easy to talk to RESTful CRUD web apps (currently Rails and Merb).

Comment from Josh McDonald on 2008-11-04

2008-11-05T02:51:31Z

We use an in-house framework (which I'd like to get OSS some time). None of the other available frameworks feel "right" to me.

Comment from johans on 2008-11-04

2008-11-05T07:20:21Z

Tom Bray's EasyMVC - simplified version using the same approaches as Cairngorm with no swc files required.

Comment from Vipin on 2008-11-06

2008-11-06T10:15:40Z

As johans said, We use Tom Bray's EasyMVC, which is very simple, but uses most of the concepts used by Cairngorm. There are lot of interesting features in the available frameworks, and we kind of mixed everything together and made an in-house framework... which is working nice - faster development, and multiple developers on the same project, no confusion on how to deal with events and commands etc...

Comment from mike on 2008-11-07

2008-11-07T19:55:21Z

we use a framework developed inhouse called GEMVC - (Good Enough) found here - http://gemvc.riaforge.org/

it uses many of the cairngorm conventions so anyone familiar with it could adopt it easily.

Comment from Bouiaw on 2008-11-12

2008-11-12T22:25:11Z

There is a lot of open source frameworks in Flex but just a few open source application, so having source code sample is not always easy !

Anyway, we have used PureMVC for 1 year and we are happy with it. If you want a real example of PureMVC application, you can have a look to Igenko source code.

Comment from William on 2008-11-18

2008-11-18T13:28:14Z

As this seems to be a good place to list existing Flex frameworks, GraniteDS includes a simple component-based framework for Flex 3 which is very similar to JBoss Seam and makes use of Flex 3 custom annotations.
It is designed to avoid the whole lot of boilerplate code implied by Cairngorm and other similar MVC based frameworks.

Comment from Alberto Acevedo on 2008-12-08

2008-12-08T13:27:50Z

I had a hard time saling the idea of using Cairngorm or Universal Mind Cairngorm extensions in my organization. The main show stopper was the use cairngorm events instead of just plain flash events. The use of Cairngorm events forces all the modules to use Cairngorm. I did some research and learned about Mate. Mate uses flash events and therefore the framework is not invasive as Cairngorm.

Comment from Tyler on 2009-04-05

2009-04-05T17:38:46Z

I used cairngorm for a while, but ended up writing my own Dependency Injection Framework...It's a bit more flexible. I just released it on Google Code. I call it "Mainline." I'll be posting some examples and advanced usage tips over on my site over the next few days.

Mainline Framework