Question

In my university a have to make a project: XMPP client on Adobe Flex. On this occasion I’ve decided to learn any architectural framework and to use it in my project. Could you advise me, what framework would be the best one for the XMPP client? What are advantages and disadvantages of this or that framework?
Thank you.

Answer 1

Timofei,

Sorry to do this to ya but I can’t give you a straight answer, like Flextras said, it’s too dependent upon the scenario.

For example, when I’m doing a mom and pop site for say family or friends generally speaking I don’t need any framework to accomplish the goals of the site and to do so in a clean enough way for me to continue working on it in the future (and not worry myself with framework bugs deprecation in newer releases and so on, assuming I save the source).

If I’m working with a group of developers choosing an architecture that allows us to work independently and not tightly couple our classes, then some sort of framework becomes a discussion (lately this discussion has gone to SWIZ or Robotlegs, and as Flextras mentioned it seems more developers are favoring Robotlegs though I haven’t heard or seen any substantial argument for one over the other).

I think its great that you’re exploring this kind of thing while in school still I wasn’t really exposed to it all until I started working, but at the same time you don’t want to be using a bazooka to kill a fly. When I first was first hired (a couple of years ago) Cairngorm was being used heavily (and for a large part still is), although this worked fairly well and we had an extension on top of it already some of the developers here (I was just a talker/pusher) from scratch built an MVC architecture. It does everything Cairngorm does plus quite a bit more and now we have people in house who have an absolutely clear understanding of the inner workings of the MVC framework, obviously if a framework is old “enough” it will undergo “enough” use cases/testing that you don’t need to know the inner workings but I certainly don’t think it hurts.

Since, you aren’t under a tight deadline I’d suggest just giving each of these a shot in a small project and see how they pan out and you’ll probably realize that you can’t see any substantial difference until you start getting into a more complex program (your program will likely look more complicated with RobotLegs or SWIZ in the basic form but once this is made into something more advanced you’d likely end up with less of your own code using one of these). Also this will help you more than anyone else’s loyalty to a particular framework.

Shaun