Various Frameworks That Help A Flex Developer

By Author: Mac Joho
Total Articles: 3
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The RIA development arena has continuously been interchangeably regarded as the Flex development market. This is credited to the account of the Adobe Flex and the technologies which have become a rage among the Flex developer community for creating state-of-the-art RIAs. The size of this community may not match the huge size of the communities for Java, PHP, or Microsoft .NET Platform, but still the open source community continues to blossom under the wake of the web based business development and processing activities. The community gets its share of innovation and creativity through its Flex developers who master at a significant number of open source Flex development frameworks.

Some of the Flex development frameworks that are quite popular among the Flex developer community are:

Cairngorm
Cairngorm was first developed and marketed by the Adobe owned Macromedia. The Flex development framework is as old as Flex itself, and hence easily being the oldest and most mature of all the frameworks. Adobe's RIA consulting ...
... services holds all the extensive rights of owning and open sourcing it. Cairngorm's maturity is the reason for its wide use for developing scalable enterprise applications based on the layered MVC implementation of Cairngorm. On the asynchronous communication, event driven and none-threaded Flex platform, Cairngorm provides a rapid and reliable way of construct a serious business application. Cairngorm aims to empower the Flex developer with a capability to naturally build simple applications with complex business logics.

ARP
Aral Balkan initially developed ARP (Ariaware RIA Platform) an ActionScript based framework and now it's hosted as one of Open Source Flash projects. ARP currently supports Macromedia Flash and Adobe Flex based RIA Development in ActionScript 2 and ActionScript 3. ARP could be the oldest framework developed for the Flash community. The first version of ARP, in Flash 5, was created in 2000 and parts were released under the open-source FC-Lib library. This evolved, over time, to Flash MX and parts were again released as open source as part of the Moose library. Since then it's evolved from Flash and now ARP can be used in Flex or AIR. Its codes directly access Flash classes so that it's reported having better performance comparing to other Flex based frameworks.

PureMVC
PureMVC is primarily an ActionScript development framework with no dependencies on any of the Flash, Flex, or any other AS3 classes; therefore, it can be used to develop any Flash based or ActionScript 3 application. As the name suggests, PureMVC is implemented according to the MVC design pattern, which includes three layers - model, view and controller. This framework is very well documented and its web site contains very rich information to help developers get started. Considering that ActionScript (ECMAScript) will be built into next generation Firefox along with the same Flash engine Adobe is using, PureMVC can be a very useful handy tools for any Flex developer to develop cross platform rich Internet applications.

Guasax Flex Framework
Guasax is an ease of use programming framework to provide ordered and scalable Flex applications.

Life cycle of Guasax framework is based in the MVC pattern to take on our program actions. One unique feature of Guasax is that the Flex developer uses an XML file to configure the actions in the business logic, which reassemble some aspects of Java Struts framework. Guasax can be extended by developing Guasax components.

Model-Glue: Flex
Model-Glue: Flex is another simple MVC based Flex framework. Joe Rinehart, the author of original Model-Glue for ColdFusion ported it to Flex. There are a few positives about Model-Glue: Flex such as its design that is more lightweight than other powerful frameworks like Cairngorm and PureMVC. This design makes it easier for the Flex developer to prototype and to develop simple Flex applications quickly.

Flest Framework
Flest is an ActionScript3 / Flex application framework for building enterprise level RIAs. It uses such design pattern as Controller, Factory, Command, etc. High efficiency, simplicity and practicality were set as its mandatory design features. Flest Framework was designed and built to be a lightweight and easy to use toolset that helps to structure the development environment on the one hand, and gives a Flex developer maximum freedom in making his own decisions on the other.

Foundry
The ServeBox Foundry (sbasfoundry) is an ActionScript 3 / Java framework designed for Flex 2 applications development. Its design is based on several design patterns, and includes tools built to resolve some of the recurrent Flex 2 development issues: Model-View sync, screen-browsing, Access-Control Lists (currently in development), localization and labels externalization, etc. Foundry is designed and implemented for mid to large scale enterprise RIA system through Flex development. It includes Java common module to tight integration between Foundry flex plug-in and server side processes.

iFlexWeb provides the clients to hire a dedicated Flex developer from the offshore development center of the Flex development company. All our Flex developers are expert in using all frameworks.