Why I chose Cairngorm
By no means am I a killer AS3/Flex Developer, but I am plugging along, learning as I go, like most of us. After dabbling with Flex for a little while, I decided to get more serious and try to structure my code in a more professional way. They are a few Flex frameworks out there and, for the isolated-self-taught-naive developer like me, choosing a framework is really confusing.
My first question was: Why add a framework on top of an already great framework (Flex)? I came to realize that I did not need to add to what Flex does very well (components, extremely easy GUI creation etc), but what I really needed was a way to create and organize my code that would make my work more efficient, more flexible and easily extended. Of course, I could decide to create my own rules and patterns, but that would be pretty silly, knowing that programmers have been working at this for decades in many languages and that my few months of experience are pretty ridiculous. So, now that I accepted the need for a framework, which one should I choose?
Ok, most of the time, I work alone. But one can dream. Maybe one day I will be working with other developers on a Flex project, so I should learn a framework that is some sort of industry standard. My focus was then centered on Cairngorm (the absolute leader, created and used by Adobe Consulting and also PureMVC, even if not used as much, seems very well respected and very smart.
So how did I choose? After reading many people's opinions and being even more confused, I found a smart little comparison by Jim Robson that did the trick for me. I loved his little Flex app showing the pros and cons of each framework.
So what made me choose Cairngorm?
1- I could not do without Flex Binding
2- Used by more people, might become a more relevant skill for employment (if ever needed)
But I was really attracted to PureMVC, because of the fact that it is a framework for many different programming languages (how cool is that?!), because of the clean MVC separation and the interesting focus on deferred instantiation... oh well, maybe later.
My first question was: Why add a framework on top of an already great framework (Flex)? I came to realize that I did not need to add to what Flex does very well (components, extremely easy GUI creation etc), but what I really needed was a way to create and organize my code that would make my work more efficient, more flexible and easily extended. Of course, I could decide to create my own rules and patterns, but that would be pretty silly, knowing that programmers have been working at this for decades in many languages and that my few months of experience are pretty ridiculous. So, now that I accepted the need for a framework, which one should I choose?
Ok, most of the time, I work alone. But one can dream. Maybe one day I will be working with other developers on a Flex project, so I should learn a framework that is some sort of industry standard. My focus was then centered on Cairngorm (the absolute leader, created and used by Adobe Consulting and also PureMVC, even if not used as much, seems very well respected and very smart.
So how did I choose? After reading many people's opinions and being even more confused, I found a smart little comparison by Jim Robson that did the trick for me. I loved his little Flex app showing the pros and cons of each framework.
So what made me choose Cairngorm?
1- I could not do without Flex Binding
2- Used by more people, might become a more relevant skill for employment (if ever needed)
But I was really attracted to PureMVC, because of the fact that it is a framework for many different programming languages (how cool is that?!), because of the clean MVC separation and the interesting focus on deferred instantiation... oh well, maybe later.
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