Recently, I've been doing a good amount of interviewing for positions as an Adobe Flex developer (freelance, to clarify—in case my day job boss happens to read this). In just about every interview, the subject of Flex frameworks eventually came up (typically, Cairngorm). I would explain that although I was aware of the existence of these frameworks, I had never really had any use for them. This decision seemed perfectly reasonable to me, but those conducting the interviews were not so impressed. Tired of losing projects because of my "lack of experience" with Flex frameworks, I set out on a mission to learn as much about them as I possibly could.

As luck would have it, the next meeting of the local user group was covering the topic of Flex frameworks—specifically, Cairngorm, Mate, and PureMVC (you can view the presentation here). I had heard of all these frameworks from regularly listening to the Flex show podcast but was not really aware of how they worked or the differences among them, which brings me to the purpose of this article.

This article provides a summary of the most popular frameworks currently available for Flex so that you can make the most informed choice possible regarding which framework best suits the needs of your team or project. It covers the Cairngorm, Mate, PureMVC, and Swiz frameworks. I chose these frameworks in particular because they have been covered by the Flex show podcast and/or have been presented at conferences such as 360|Flex.

Requirements

In order to make the most of this article, you need the following software and files:

Flex Builder 3

• Try
• Buy

Prerequisite knowledge

Reader should know what Adobe Flex is and have a basic understanding of what the term framework refers to. Additionally, a basic understanding of Object Oriented Programming principles and Design patterns would be helpful as well.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

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