Flex Frameworks - get your digest
Add commentsI was browsing through my daily digest this morning and found two things that I thought are worth listening to. There are two new podcast on Flex Frameworks, one is from The Flex Show w/ Thomas Burleson talking about Cairngorm and Universal Minds Cairngorm Extensions. I havent used these extensions myself yet, but after listening to the podcast, Tom talks about a lot of things I run into using Cairngorm. As a serious user of Cairngorm and other design patterns I plan on using these puppies in the very near future along with Transfer. My goal is that it will make me more effecient and I can leverage some more best practices when building RIA Apps in Flex/AIR.
The second podcast I listened two was from Coldfusion Weekly, the topic is Flex frameworks and there is a pretty good round table discussion on the topic, honestly I havent heard a poor round table discussion from these guys yet (nice job!). I recommend checking it out. I am excited to see the framework AsFusion is going to release soon called Mate (Mah-Tae). As always Laura and the folks at AsFusion are going the extra mile, good job guys for taking on the task of creating a framework. Doing anything for free and than releasing it to the public eye isn't easy. Another framework that is discussed in the roundtable is PureMVC, "Originally written for ActionScript 3 to serve the Flash, Flex, AIR platforms, PureMVC has been ported to nearly all major languages and platforms." I checked this out a little bit via their website. All of the non Flex/Air ports are in beta and are in need of pioneers to improve them, if you're interested in contributing go check out their site!
So without recommending a framework over another, I am just going to say I use Cairngorm, not because I think its better... it just happened to be around before the other frameworks. For now I will continue to use it until I get some free time to learn/try a different one. I also use ColdSpring and Mach II for my Coldfusion projects, and I use Coldspring in my Flex projects as well in terms of my CF backend. I plan on integrating Cairngorm, ColdSpring and Transfer in a project I am getting ready to start. I am looking forward to trying out Transfer. I currently use a generator to build all of my normal DAO, Gateway, Bean CFC's called Illudium PU-36 Code Generator. I recently had a small database change and I had to recreate my CFCs. It wasnt painful, but it was time I could of spent doing something else. I am hoping Tranfer solves this problem, only time will tell.
Overall, frameworks help me avoid common mistakes. I tend to operate and think pretty systematically, so I like things layed out in a structure. Maybe thats why I tend to use frameworks over developing my own structure. It simply saves me time in my development process and helps me avoid common mistakes I may make that frameworks tend to help me avoid making.
Also, a set of Transfer templates is included in the generator.
Yup, Illudium is awesome (thanks for creating it!), A friend of mine actually got me started using it (Kyle Hayes). I recently had a change in the database structure and it was a pretty easy change since all I did was recreate the DAO, gateway, bean and modified my service to work with the new files.
Do you have a link to that resource you mentioned?
Anyway, I think someone posted it to the mailing list (http://groups.google.com/group/cfcgenerator). There really isn't much to the template though since the additional CFC has no real contents by default as it simply extends the base CFC.
I still recommend Transfer with Illudium as the fastest means to develop an application in CF.
here is an another nice site <a href="http://web-adobe.blogspot.com">http://web-adobe.blogspot.com</a>;