Mate, an unobtrusive Flex application framework
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
If you are tired of application frameworks that tie your code together and makes it an unwieldy mess, take a look at Mate.
Mate is quite unintrusive, lets you configure your application declaratively in MXML and does most of the boring things for you. Judging from the documentation and examples it looks like good competitor in the less-than-crowded marked of Flex application frameworks.
The core of Mate is something called the event map which describes what should happen when your application dispatched events of different types. For each event one or more handlers can be invoked. A handler can be everything from calling a method on an object, running a command or invoking a remote object call and there is room for writing your own specialised handlers. Handlers can also run in sequence and get hold of the previous handler’s result, which makes it possible to create quite complex logic. All this is done in MXML, which means that your configuration is also the actual wiring of your application — and it’s readable and quite easy to understand.
My only objection is how Mate handles updating of views. If I understand it correctly, there are two ways, either you have an injector which looks up the view and pushes values into it, or you have an instance of a dispatcher in your view where you listen for result events and update accordingly. Both remove the benefits of bindings, and while they are certainly better than the global variable lookup of other Flex frameworks, I’m not sure I like them. On the other hand I think you can skip that part and inject the model into the views directly. On the third hand, injectors can potentially make your code more decoupled.
Update: see comments below for a clarification on this issue by the framework’s author.