[From]http://blog.vixiom.com/2007/11/09/evaluating-flex-application-frameworks/
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?
