Hi Jon,

My company is considering switching to Flex (from Oracle Forms… yuk), and I’m currently looking for a framework, to develop a highly customisable application (we have different features for each customer…).

I see that I’m not the only one confused by the recent Cairngorm announcement. I started looking at comparisons between Cairngorm, PureMVC, Mate, Swiz… and would like your take on these different frameworks (obviously, you don’t like Cairngorm…).

I need something not too complicated, so that Forms developers don’t immediately reject the new technology (Mate seems fairly simple).

Thanks,

Chris.

“MVC2/Model 2, which was created to deal with building user interface within request/response model. This model is completely at odds with building a rich Internet application.” Rather than spending the blogpost complaining about how bad it is, you should of listed whats wrong, and why its wrong in your opinion. I do agree with your points, after working with both Cairngorm, but I instead went with PureMVC, which I feel like you would probably make the same arguments of silly design patterns, and over architected (at least this is what I feel are your major arguments for cairngorm).

@Chris

I used to work at a company that used Oracle Forms and migrated to Flex 2/3. Over there, Cairngorm was pretty much universally disliked.

We tried PureMVC on a project and it was easier than Cairngorm, but it was still a bit roundabout and complicated for doing simple tasks. Check out this link for a discussion on Flex frameworks.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flex_framework_02.html

I share the same sediment, in fact, I was the lone voice at my current employer advocating NOT using a micro-framework, a debate I lost. Flex’s event architecture coupled with the power of ActionScript (if you’re willing to use it, and not write it like it’s Java, i.e. embrace closures) and a few conventions will allow for the creation of clean, usable code. Mate, Swiz, PureMVC, Cairngorm, SpringAS, etc, they’re all trying to bring answers to Java’s hurdles into Flex. A previous comment asks “what’s wrong with it?” I’ll give one example. Flex’s data binding is not the end all, there are plenty of instances where code in your UI needs to have a hookpoint after an asynchronous response is received. Most people use Cairngorm’s “view locator” to interface into the view from the command, but at that point, you’ve lost all that the commands supposedly buy you. I find myself constantly working around the framework, a prediction I made before we started using it.

What you have to remember is that Cairngorm has always blown goats.

It was created by IterationTwo and hyped as the best thing ever for Flex development. At the time there was no other Flex frameworks to compare it to so it ‘won’ by default.

What they always failed to mention was that it was actually the best for their own bottom line because it gave their company tons of ‘credibility’ and lead to them being bought out.

They are now ‘Adobe Consulting’.

Cairngorm is the worst framework for Flex development and I highly recommend not using it.

It will turn a light weight, modular, and clean application into a gigantic non-modular piece of crap that takes long to write and is hard to maintain.

That and it will multiply the number of files and the size of your application by ~8x.

Hi Chris,
It’s good to hear about more Flex adoption.

On my current project we are using Mate. It’s ok, but I don’t think I would use it again. I just don’t think it does enough for the extra overhead it imposes. It also seem better suited to smaller applications with simpler flows. When we selected Mate, I did an in-depth evaluation on Swiz and like they way it approaches things. We went with Mate over it because we had team members with previous experience working with it. The Parsley framework has been all the rage lately: http://www.spicefactory.org/parsley/. I haven’t looked at it yet, but it’s next on my list to checkout.

Good Luck.
-Jon

Hi Cease,
In some of my older posts, I went into more detail on the issues I see in Cairngorm. In this post, I was trying to give a high level summary to set the context for my thoughts about the recent Cairngorm news. You can find my older post here:
http://gorillajawn.com/wordpress/2007/05/29/cairngorm-framework-%E2%80%93-a-few-suggestions/
http://gorillajawn.com/wordpress/2007/05/21/cairngorm-%E2%80%93-flex-application-framework-my-initial-reactions/
Thanks for the comment,
Jon

Bucky,
Thanks for your comment. I think you summarize a common experience with Cairngorm and PureMVC well. I think it’s worth noting that Flex is very powerful on it’s own, and there not always a good reason to drag in an MVC framework (i.e. one can easily do MVC in Flex without any additional framework).
Thanks,
Jon

Thanks for the comment Allen. I completely agree!

We are using swiz on are current project and really liking it. http://code.google.com/p/swizframework/

It is very lightweight and unobtrusive. With all the bad reviews on cairngorm why doesn’t Adobe take a hint a drop it? If Flex developers are ever forced into using a cairngorm I would rather go back to using plain HTML.

Parsley seems to be coming along very well and the lead developer Jens seems very responsive in the Parsley forums.

RobotLegs is another framework which is built on solid OOP principles and is almost at 1.0:

http://shaun.boyblack.co.za/blog/2009/10/07/robotlegs-as3-v0-9-elasticchaos-broken-fixed-tidied-improved/

Thanks to all for the input, although I’m a little bummed that Jon has decided not to use Mate again (it was my favorite “on paper”). The following two comparisons favor it, but they’re probably already outdated…:
http://www.insideria.com/2008/12/frameworkquest-2008-introducti.html
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37043/flex-mvc-frameworks

I’m turned on by the apparent simplicity, especially compared to Cairngorm and PureMVC. Also, it seems that if I chose Mate and realized I’d made a mistake, it would be easier to switch because of the absence of framework code in the views, business logic, and server access.

But I will now check out the links you guys have posted.

Hi

I’m new to Flex development, but I have a strong background in Java (Spring, Struts, Stripes) and Action Based MVC frameworks

I think that impose a “Action Based MVC” framework in a RIA is a big error, must if is based on Struts.

Is necessary to understand that “Action Based MVC” are a great help (at least in the case of Stripes, Struts is a pain in the …) in a Request/Response scenario. But In a RIA scenario is shooting your self in the foot.

At this point I think that Flex is very competent presentation technology and you don’t need and extra layer of complexity. With a good knowledge of OOP, you’ll produce correct applications in Flex in no time.

The two things that I miss are the language: ActionScript is a nice language (and IntelliJ helps a lot), but some things are a bit odd; and a IoC container (Maybe I’ll pick Spring AS)

Another happy swiz user here. You can use it as much or as little as you want. Many conveniences, like being able to listen for an event anywhere in any class or mxml within the app.

I think opinions like this from seasoned Java guys should be required reading for anyone who has come to Flash from elsewhere, like a design background (myself included). The worst are the people who have come to Flash a looong time ago, seen it grow, and learned programming with Flash (myself included), and then get all excited about adding more and more architecture to Flash. I’m lucky to work with people who have been through this on Java, so they’re there to hit me on the head if I start to get tempted by shiny frameworks…

I agree with you jonr. Model2 /MVC pattern was an improvement over model 1 development with jsp, asp but has nothing to do now a days in a Flash client.

My expirience with model 2 frameworks in Java is huge i have developed with and tested a lot of them and what i can say is that kind of frameworks are very prone to errors because for building a simple page you have to touch and configure too many things.

Flex framework is clean enought to allow everybody build understandable applications.