Remember when FuseBox came out for the ColdFusion community? Wow, it was great. Finally, we had a professionally developed code framework that was being adopted by people and companies worldwide. It showed even basic developers how code organization, standards, and design patterns could help them make a better product, and even help them professionally.
Based on that success, other brilliant people started creating, or porting, other successful frameworks for ColdFusion. We now have a good variety of very well-made frameworks from which to choose when starting a project. In fact, some of the “high brow” developers in our community now poo-poo Fusebox as something for beginners (I am not one of those), and Fusebox now takes somewhat of a back seat to some of the more advanced and intricate frameworks in many development shops now.
In my mind, this is how I see the future for the Flex world as well. Right now, Cairngorm is the 400-pound gorilla in the community – not only because it was the first major player in the market, but is also backed by Adobe Consulting – and I expect it is being used by the majority of Flex development shops out there. Cairngorm is a great architecture and was developed using solid, industry-proven design patterns. However, as with most thing in the technology world, it has some weaknesses and drawbacks (though many of them have been “resolved” with extensions to the architecture).
Now, I’m not saying that Cairngorm will suffer the fate of Fusebox, but I think there will be some parallels in that the Cairngorm adoption rate will slowly reduce as other players enter the market with viable alternatives.
If you are currently in the process of evaluating Flex for your shop, or have already moving forward with Flex and are looking for a common framework or architecture on which you can build your applications, you now have some options other than Cairngorm.
Take some time to evaluate these projects and see which one fits your team, your business processes, and development lifecycles.
One Response for "Flex Frameworks: You Now Have Options"
Steve,
Legato (http://code.google.com/p/legato/) an IOC framework similar to Swiz does exists I need to still use it but it seems similar to what Swiz offers.
There is also a IOC framework that works in conjunction with Caringorm and PureMVC called prana (http://www.pranaframework.org/)
Cheers!!!
-Hem
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