Cairngorm v. Mate: why can’t we be friends?

Matt C — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:06:18 +0000

At Flex Pasta there was an interesting post ( Mate Framework: Should it be the new standard in Flex 4?) about Mate and how it should overtake Cairngorm as the framework of choice for Flex developers. I know it was the choice at the Charity Code Jam at 360|Flex Indy. When talking frameworks no one really wanted to go down the Cairngorm road, primarily due to time constraints. Unfortunately, we ran into a different problem, no one really knew Mate, at least well enough to really drive things until the single “Mate Expert” that had championed the framework returned. I know that has nothing to do with Mate’s feasibility, but it left a somewhat bad taste in my mouth. I still plan to learn about Mate, but it’s not on my rush list.

So, while Brian is gung-ho about Mate, I’m much more hesitant. I know Cairngorm and all my current projects use it. The conversion from Cairngorm to Mate may be impossible (or at least overwhelmingly difficult) in my current work environment. There’s also the barrier to knowledge of the team, having to change mindsets from the singleton pattern to an injection pattern. However, for new projects what is the choice?

His biggest pro-Mate point seemed to be a point for Cairngorm in my book. Mate has had 17 releases in the past year, while there are no Cairngorm releases and only 15 commits to its subversion repository. That tells me Cairngorm is either dead, stable, or both. Since I’m sitting next to a Book (Professional Adobe Flex 3) published in the last month with a 4 chapter section on Cairngorm, I’m pretty sure it’s not dead. Brian also says the code is quite stable but there isn’t a 1.0 release. I think 17 releases and “hundreds of commits” tells another story. Those commits are either bug fixes or features but it’s obvious they’re still working on the code. Nothing wrong with that, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Interestingly, he talks about Cairngorm as if it’s the default Flex framework. However, this article on choosing a framework, hosted on Adobe’s Developer Connect site, talks about 4 frameworks (Cairngorm, Mate, PureMVC, & Swiz) with pros and cons of each. Of the four, I’ve only dealt with Cairngorm enough to use it effectively. Other than my Mate experience at 360|Flex, I haven’t really done anything with it. I’d used PureMVC in a little learning side project but only succeeded in confusing myself until I “got” it and realized that I was doing a lot of things wrong. Rather than rework something I didn’t have any real need for I just let it slide.

I think the idea of Cairngorm being the “Adobe Framework” has more to do with it’s pervasive nature across projects due to the “first out of the gate” status and being hosted on Adobe’s servers. There’s nothing that forces Cairngorm on people, it’s just a result of the age. If Mate’s future is as bright as it looked at 360|Flex I’m sure we’ll see someone blogging about Mate being “old and dusty” in the future while some hot new framework is breaking ground somewhere else. Just don’t complain when Mate is stable and doesn’t need a new release every month.

Enigmatic Thought » swiz

Cairngorm v. Mate: why can’t we be friends?

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