By Derek Santos – Consultant

There are definitely a good amount of Flex Frameworks out there nowadays; but choosing the right one can be a daunting task.  While Cairngorm 2 is arguably the most popular, Parsley is now a major contender. In fact, Cairngorm 3 contains similar concepts as Parsley, and even suggests it as part of its framework.  Of course, deciding which one to use all depends on what you’re trying to do, and how large and complex your application is.

The nice thing about Cairngorm 2 is its ease of use and its well defined architecture.  This doesn’t mean Parsley is difficult, but it does have a slightly steeper learning curve in exchange for more features and customization.  If you’re building a simple application, Cairngorm 2 is probably the way to go.  More and more applications, however, are beginning to require something more robust and extensible.  This is where Parsley comes in.  I’ve listed below the pros and cons of each framework.

Cairngorm 2

Pros

• The Cairngorm 2 Event framework is familiar to Flex developers
• Shorter learning curve
• Small footprint compared to Parsley
• Well known to the community

Cons

• Hard to extend and customize
• Use of singletons(arguable)
• App can become polluted with boilerplate code
• Not much support for Flex modules

Parsley

Pros

• Dependency Injection
• Event/Messaging framework can be customized
• Documentation is very good
• Lots of features that are useful in larger applications
• Completely customizable/extensible

Cons

• Steeper learning curve
• View configuration can be a memory hog if not careful
• Larger footprint
• Requires some decisions upfront to clearly define your architecture

What I’ve mentioned above is obviously just my own opinions, I’d love to hear the communities opinions as well so please comment if your agree or disagree with what I’ve said.