Application development frameworks - Flex best practices

Flex best practices – Part 2: Development practices | Adobe Developer Connection

Using a framework you will greatly increase your chances of success, especially if your application contains a substantial amount of source code.

Consider using an application development framework

There is some disagreement about whether or not frameworks should be used when developing Flex applications. For enterprise level applications, as well as in teams of developers, frameworks are more generally recommended. My personal preference and recommendation is to use an application development framework. This enables a common language for the architecture of a codebase and provides direction for application development and scalability.

Use frameworks for team-based development efforts

Frameworks help teams to work together in a unified effort and can reduce the chances of duplicating development efforts.

Mate

Mate (pronounced "mah-tay") is a tag-based application development framework created for use with Flex. Mate is an unintrusive framework that allows for a loosely coupled codebase.

Cairngorm

Cairngorm is the de facto standard for Flex application development. If you don't already know Cairngorm you should definitely consider learning it. For more information on Cairngorm, check out this great Introducing Cairngorm article. Adobe Consulting uses Cairngorm and fully stands behind it for their development efforts.

PureMVC

This is a pure ActionScript 3.0 Model-View-Controller application development framework. Futurescale, the makers of PureMVC, describe it as follows: "PureMVC is a lightweight framework for creating applications based upon the classic Model-View-Controller design meta-pattern… The PureMVC framework has a very narrow main goal: to help you separate your application's coding concerns into three discrete tiers; Model, View and Controller."

Other frameworks

There are numerous other application development frameworks that can be used in conjunction with Flex or even just straight AS3 projects.

Know when NOT to use a framework

There are times when a framework is simply overkill for an application. If you are the sole developer of an application and you will be the only developer of the application for its lifetime, then you may not benefit from a framework. If you're developing something very simple, such as a banner ad, you can also skip the framework. The robust feature set offered by an application development framework is often not needed for very simple applications with limited data manipulation and minimal events. For another perspective, see this classic blog post by Steven Webster on the topic of when and when not to use an application development framework.