Mate Flex Framework

POSTED IN Actionscript, Flex | TAGS : Flex, framework, mate, mvc, mxml, swiz September 8, 2009

In my quest to continually improve my Flex skills, I’m always on the lookout for new technologies, open source projects and frameworks. One of them particularly caught my eye when it came out and I haven’t been able to touch it until recently.

Ever since I started developing Flex, the only real Enterprise level framework out there that was tried and trusted was Cairngorm.  It tries (emphasis on tries) to implement an MVC pattern in your projects so that it’s easier to manage and reuse your code.  However, something I’ve noticed over the years is that Adobe Consulting, the people that made Cairngorm, are not exactly great developers.  This is very apparent with the framework they put out because even though they say that it’s an MVC framework, it is not.  It’s very far from a good MVC pattern, but since it was the only one out there, a lot of developers didn’t have a choice other than creating a new one from scratch.

Fortunately, this has recently changed with a plethora of new frameworks that actually do implement MVC properly.  The two most notable are Swiz and Mate.  Both are really good, however only Mate utilizes Flex to its full potential since most of it can be done with MXML.  It makes it very easy to use and actually quite fun to code with.

In the spirit of supporting and using this fine open source project, I registered another channel on Freenode called #flex-mate.  This would be an open discussion channel about the Mate framework.  If you’re in any way related to the Mate framework, I strongly suggest you come visit the channel and support this amazing project.