I have written favorably about both Cairngorm and PureMVC, and this has led a number of people to ask which framework I prefer. Rather than make a blanket statement that one framework is better than the other, it seems more profitable to take a few moments to discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Let’s start by emphasizing that the two frameworks share a number of strengths. Both of them provide conventions that, once learned, enable you to build complex applications faster. Both of them lend themselves (in varying degrees) to team development. Both of them promote some level of code reuse. Both of them help you make applications that are easy to maintain and extend. Both of them will enable you to build applications that any experienced Object-Oriented developer will be able to get up to speed on very quickly. Both of them give you complete control over event flows. (When using native Flex events, you need to be aware of bubbling, and whether there is any native Flex code that is also listening for the event you’re dispatching, but each of these frameworks addresses this issue - PureMVC implements a publish/subscribe system with its notifications, and Cairngorm uses CairngormEvent/CairngormEventDispatcher.)

Having looked at what the two frameworks have in common, let’s now take a look at what makes them different. Since we’re talking about Flex frameworks, I thought it would be fun to put the comparison matrix in an AdvancedDataGrid component:

You can open and interact with the matrix here. (Building it wasn’t as much fun as it should have been, but I’ll address that in a future post.)

I’m sure there’s much more that could be said, and I hope that you’ll add your thoughts to this discussion. If you don’t want to post your comments/questions here in the blog, feel free to contact me directly.