Adobe Consulting recommends to NOT store any data at the ModelLocator level. Instead, you should create model objects that are referenced from the ModelLocator. The ModelLocator exists to LOCATE your model objects.

@John and cease, I agree with your comments on PureMVC. But what my posts have been really driving at is that it depends on your application, your team, your organization, etc. I don’t agree that PureMVC (or any of the other frameworks) will be the right choice all the time. But if you need extensibility, yes, PureMVC is a good candidate.

@iongion, I also agree with your comments on the frameworks, but for me, I don’t think it’ll always be Cairngorm.

@James, hmm … I took a look at Swiz, but just like you said it’s a balance. I figured I’d put the framework with the most and least number of required artifacts. Swiz is somewhere in the middle. But I may have missed some of its intricacies, by not including it here.

@Darren, I agree with your comment on the ModelLocator. And in my previous post, I do know the solution to that. But not everyone agrees with me that it should just be at the top-level. And since that’s how the Cairngorm tutorial teaches it, that’s how I presented it here.

Thanks for all your comments!!

http://www.ericfeminella.com/blog/2008/09/21/dependency-injection-iocdi-in-flex/
http://www.rzrsharp.net/2009/02/roll-your-own-dependency-injection/

@ wjptak, Cairgorm 2.2.1 was released in May 2007 with support for modules. All of our Cairngorm projects use modules where I work. What specific issues are you referring to?

Anyone tried the spicefactory stuff?

Thanks

1) PureMVC – this is so painful to understand, probably it has the best documentation compared to other frameworks (and not only flex frameworks), but the darn thing is really hard to grasp.

2) Mate – it is innovative, very mxml-ish (very cfml-ish ) … but what your code ends up to look is like a tag soup, some would like the soup, other will not see it beautiful.

3) Cairngorm – EASY, it is the easiest to learn of them all, especially for flash developers moving to flex with no java experience(i learned design patterns using this framework) … but it also introduces an “anti”-pattern, that model locator, that you so diplomatically say it gets huge (it gets gargantuan for minimal applications)

To conclude, if one wants to work from a non-framework with a framework and wants to learn to use one fast, a good choice would be cairngorm.

But, it’s a bad tradeoff, because we’re giving it away for free, and a lot of apps don’t have binding inefficiency problems.

Thank for your article. Your comparison is well prepared, however I might add few things.
1. ‘No framework’ almost always end up as a sort of framework – all of us uses some approach that we shape up and copy from one project to another. On the other hand, it is very important to stress that this approach requires quite high skills from developers when they share the project. This is major disadvantage.
2. As one of major disadvantages of Cairngorm and PureMVC I would also indicate big load of files that are needed to be created. Also, PureMVC as one of good practice is using code behind, which is suitable for many developers but result in even more files. This doesn’t happen in frameworks like Mate or Swiz.
3. Cairngorm and Modules – there is a lot of buzz about this but surely at the moment we don’t have a very clean approach to do this. Of course it is possible, however it’s not supported by the framework by default.
4. Mate – for many developers problem here lies in using only MXML files, sometimes this approach isn’t so very handy.
5. Swiz – I believe it’s worth mentioning. Supported by the large and dynamic community, shaped and polished each week. It has great advantages, I have found it really useful and it allows me to write code at much higher speed than other ones. However, it has also disadvantages – for example, refactoring might be difficult due to use of meta tags.

Best regards,
W.