Several months ago, I was looking for a framework that would streamline AS3 application development. Cairngorm and PureMVC were the most mature frameworks out there and I remember being particularly impressed with PureMVC mainly due to the solid documentation that came with it. Cairngorm may be robust, but I just couldn’t get my head wrapped around it by glancing at the docs and examples. In contrast, PureMVC came with a Conceptual Diagram that explained the framework using the design patterns that I was familiar with. Cairngorm does have similar diagrams that explain its microarchitecture, but it exemplifies my initial thoughts — I just couldn’t get a quick, big picture understanding of it easily. Not only has Cliff Hall done a masterful job on the PureMVC framework, but the effort he’s put into the documentation really underscores the importance of documentation and diagrams on dissemination and adoption.
Cairngorm or PureMVC?
Recently, Ali Mills and Luke Bayes made a presentation on Flex Application Frameworks. Their choices essentially boiled down to Cairngorm and PureMVC and concluded that PureMVC came out on top. However, I highly recommend that developers watch the whole presentation as many enterprise developers in the audience made comments that challenged the easy differentiation of the two frameworks. Having the backing of a stable organization like Adobe, as is the case with Cairngorm, means a lot for enterprise development. Also, this post on Bill Lane’s blog and several comments implying that PureMVC is much harder to learn than Cairngorm got me thinking if a really simple application would help scaffold the transition to PureMVC.
I’ve implemented the minimalist example from the MVC chapter of our book (available as a free download from Adobe Devnet) using the PureMVC framework. Now this is not a full-fledged application, but a very minimal example meant to explain the inner workings of the PureMVC framework. Before diving in, a brief introduction to some of the important aspects of the framework will help. This was the hard stuff that I had to internalize before starting out. These concepts are more eloquently explained in much greater detail by Cliff Hall in the framework documentation.
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