Until the last moment I have been very sceptic about every Flex framework I have seen. I have not paid too much attention to Cairngorm or PureMVC but I was aware of their specifics. For example I don’t really like a global accessibility of View which appears to be available everywhere in code of a project which is written using Cairngorm. Also I was stuck with amount of mediator classes in PureMVC which cause growing up of the code’s size. That is why I have never used something except default component and event model of Flex Framework.
I was impressed by great feedbacks of RIA-gurus and decided to find out that is the matter. Don’t expect, I am not going to write about Mate’s model behavior but I will write only a few sentences. Mate is really cool!
I think the success of Mate relates to the fact that framework is not ported but exclusively written for Flex. It uses the main (maybe not very correct) principals and peculiarities of Flex Framework, such as:
- Inheritance of all visual components from EventDispatcher which give us possibility to use bubbling-events as transport messages between View and Model.
- Binding for IOC (Inversion of Controls).
- MXML for describing in simple way dependency declarations between application’s layers.
All I have described above works with your custom classes and components without mandatory inheriting of fatiguable abstract classes for commands, mediators, models etc. And for afters Mate Framework is extensible by custom plugins.
Altogether you could get the first impression after reading Mate documentation not longer then one hour. Reviewing of the source code confirms that framework’s authors are good professionals who turned back Flex’s issues to benefits. Let’s use it.
