If you can’t decide between Cairngorm or PureMVC, Luke Bayes and Ali Mills have a presentation up that walks through the pros and cons of ten different frameworks:
- Slide (not yet released)
- ARP (I read somewhere that v3 was going to be Rails like in it’s ease of use ARP development seems to have stalled now that Aral Balkan is focusing on SWX)
- Servebox Foundry (tied to a Java server product)
- Guasax
- Flest
- MVCS (they mention in the presentation that it’s not really a framework but a blueprint, UPDATE: it is a framework after all see comments)
- Model Glue: Flex
- Cairngorm
- PureMVC
- None of the Above
Of the above I’ve tried/used ARP, MVCS, Cairngorm, and PureMVC. My favorite being PureMVC, I was using Cairngorm for a while but most of my Flex projects are one developer (me myself and I) and don’t last longer than a month. I know a lot of enterprisey applications use Cairngorm but everytime I write (or generate) a bunch of files or whatever for just one user gesture I have voice in the back of my mind – with a Danish accent eerily similar to David Heinemeier Hansson’s – saying “six files to do one thing? AYFKM?”. PureMVC takes it down to like three files, but as with Cairngorm unless you have Computer Science degree to learning curve is still quite steep.
Luke and Ali included ‘None of the Above’ as one of the choices and that’s what I usually go with for my two day to two week projects. Flex is a framework itself and with my simple custom MVC setup adds what’s missing (basicly a way to consistently structure the files). I still wish there was a Flex framework that’s as accessible as Ruby on Rails, I think much of the problem is that Flex was originally targeted (and often still is) as a front-end for Java apps so framework developers bring all this Java baggage to with them. Where’s the friendly Flex framework?
2 Comments
Hey There,
I just wanted to share one correction in that MVCS is in fact a framework, not just a blueprint. Fortunately, one of the audience members corrected us on that one, but we haven’t been able to make time yet to really evaluate it.
Thanks for mentioning our post!
Servebox.org : Maven Flex Plugin and AS Foundry Framework have been refreshed
Since december 1st, ServeBox.org brings together Maven Flex Plugin and ActionScript Foundry projects. AS Foundry have been created in 2005. In 2007 the project turns into an open source project available on SourceForge. The new version 2.0 brings some fixes and add numerous new functionalities.
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Maven Flex Plugin gives the ability to use Maven 2.0 for the flex development of applications. This plugin enable the developer to compile, unit test and generate all the action script documentation.
ServeBox’s ActionScript Foundry (AS Foundry) is made of productivity tools and ActionScript 3/Java framework. This framework leverage the power of both universe : Flex and Java.
Based on design patterns, the AS Foundry framework reduce the development cycle of complex applications. Indeed, you will find ready-to-use tools : data synchronization for MVC model, authorizations, internationalization, and even more ! This framework is divided into 5 libraries :
Commons : base types and tools,
Foundry : MVC Framework,
AirFoundry : ASFoundry extension in order to use it with Adobe AIR.
Toolbox : advanced toolbox (navigation, ACL, full-text search…)
Foundry-Java-Commons : Java classes created to speed up the development cycle for the client-side (Flex) and server-side (FDS-LCDS-BlazeDS).
Maven Flex Plugin and AS Foundry are available today under the Apache 2.0 open source license. So you may use them on commercial and open source projects.
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Maven Flex Plugin : http://www.servebox.org/maven-flex-plugin/
ActionScript Foundry : http://www.servebox.org/actionscript-foundry/
The ServeBox.org Team.