As you might know I have been experimenting with Flex for a while. Due to the ability to target andoid/iOS/facebook in one go!
But the way I am wired I need to know just about everything about the technology before I start to get my feet wet. I learnt this with C#. Didn't know about reference types vs. value types after a whole year of coding! (although ... I do miss the careless abandon of my old coding ways)
I feel that now I have the language Actionscript down (I wrote a small book "Actionscript for C# developers" that I will share after its more stable) and have a fair understanding of the flex / flash apis. I now need to dive into the community work that has been done in flex.
Like silverlight / wpf (where I finally settled with MVVMLight ... and I know why I did that ;) ) I am going about searching for the most community accepted solution for flex. Fortunately I know about dependency injection, MVC (thanks to django), a lot about databinding (thanks to mvvm / silverlight / wpf) so its not a voyage of discovery rather a voyage of rediscovery.
Just FYI : With Silverlight / WPF it is clear to me that if I have ICommand delegate based implementation, a servicelocator implementation (and after MEF is officially a part .NET framework why go with any other?) , an INPC implementation and some form of App encompassing Mediator .... I am good to go! Now I need to figure out how these translate to Flex and what are the solutions proposed by the community.
Here are my two cents for flex:
Cairngorm (what was)
One thing is clear. Cairngorm is the official adobe solution : http://sourceforge.net/adobe/cairngorm/home/Home/ but is a no go for new projects. Its not really the ideal actionscript solution to the types of problems that are faced : http://archive.davidtucker.net/2009/10/13/the-current-state-of-flex-frameworks/
I do feel however that one should view how it was architectured before moving on to the community shiny frameworks.
Community (what is )
So now the question really comes down to which of these is the way to go. I am selecting the most popular solutions (high number of community supporters) here and not going with the completeness / quality. Because I am trying to be a late adapter for now :)
So heres the list I will be evaluating along with first opinions:
I took me about three months of active research and reading to fullly abridge the whole MVVM frameworks story for silverlight / wpf. I hope it will turn out faster for flex.
Till then enjoy!
Update October 2011: It has become pretty clear to me that RobotLegs is the way to go. Infact it is one of the most watched Actionscript libraries on GitHub!
But the way I am wired I need to know just about everything about the technology before I start to get my feet wet. I learnt this with C#. Didn't know about reference types vs. value types after a whole year of coding! (although ... I do miss the careless abandon of my old coding ways)
I feel that now I have the language Actionscript down (I wrote a small book "Actionscript for C# developers" that I will share after its more stable) and have a fair understanding of the flex / flash apis. I now need to dive into the community work that has been done in flex.
Like silverlight / wpf (where I finally settled with MVVMLight ... and I know why I did that ;) ) I am going about searching for the most community accepted solution for flex. Fortunately I know about dependency injection, MVC (thanks to django), a lot about databinding (thanks to mvvm / silverlight / wpf) so its not a voyage of discovery rather a voyage of rediscovery.
Just FYI : With Silverlight / WPF it is clear to me that if I have ICommand delegate based implementation, a servicelocator implementation (and after MEF is officially a part .NET framework why go with any other?) , an INPC implementation and some form of App encompassing Mediator .... I am good to go! Now I need to figure out how these translate to Flex and what are the solutions proposed by the community.
Here are my two cents for flex:
Cairngorm (what was)
One thing is clear. Cairngorm is the official adobe solution : http://sourceforge.net/adobe/cairngorm/home/Home/ but is a no go for new projects. Its not really the ideal actionscript solution to the types of problems that are faced : http://archive.davidtucker.net/2009/10/13/the-current-state-of-flex-frameworks/
I do feel however that one should view how it was architectured before moving on to the community shiny frameworks.
Community (what is )
So now the question really comes down to which of these is the way to go. I am selecting the most popular solutions (high number of community supporters) here and not going with the completeness / quality. Because I am trying to be a late adapter for now :)
So heres the list I will be evaluating along with first opinions:
- PureMVC :
http://puremvc.org/ It is quite popular (in fact possibly the most popular if stackoverflow is to be believed) and according to this http://puremvc.org/content/view/67/178/ (the about page) PureMVC gives me all that I need. Its so popular that people want to port it to other languages: http://trac.puremvc.org/PureMVC - Mate
Another quite popular framework : http://mate.asfusion.com/ The great thing is that it used metadata tags (C# lingo think attributes) to get stuff done with makes me feel its FOR flex and solves problems true to the domain. - RobotLegs:
http://www.robotlegs.org/ Its either the best thing since sliced bread or a shiny fridge magnet ... I can't tell. Will need more research. But it is popular. - Parsley:
http://www.spicefactory.org/parsley/ Seems to solve all the problems I need solved. Again community support is extensive and the software is under active development. - Swiz
Seem just about as mentioned as RobotLegs : http://swizframework.org/ All that I have to say about this is the website design is clean! :D The framework sounds really cool. But I will need to take all of these for a spin to give final judgement.
I took me about three months of active research and reading to fullly abridge the whole MVVM frameworks story for silverlight / wpf. I hope it will turn out faster for flex.
Till then enjoy!
Update October 2011: It has become pretty clear to me that RobotLegs is the way to go. Infact it is one of the most watched Actionscript libraries on GitHub!
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