In this article I would like to share my experience in application development using Flex to make it easier for you to choose to use or not to use it in particular situations. Far too often it appears that using Flex is not only unwelcome because of time limits but can also be damaging to the project.

First let’s overview application types to search for the fertile field for starting Flex development. Apparently we can already divide the applications we are interested in into desktop and web-top applications. Web applications may be usual (casual) or RIA, and each of them may have either front-end (surface site) or back-end (admin panel). We must never forget that they may be internet type for casual men of the web and intranet type for corporative users. With the help of Adobe AIR Flex became available on desktop but its usage comply with the same requirements as it does on web.

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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.