Today I listened to the ColdFusion Weekly podcast.

The topic was Flex Frameworks Roundtable

Peter and Matt got together the different "voices" of the Flex Frameworks out there and got them talking.

Speaking personally the saying, "If all you have is a hammer, then everything is a nail" rings true for my experience with frameworks. I tend to find once I get my head-space in a particular framework I find myself approaching all the problems I need to solve within that framework.

In ColdFusion, "Fusebox" was that framework for me for a while, and currently "Cairngorm" is the Flex one.

While it is not a bad thing to actually learn a tool/framework well, it's great to listen to well respected members of the various framework communities flesh out what problems their favorite framework is trying to solve, and how.

A couple of the things that stuck with me are:

- the less "boiler plate" code you have to write to add functionality to an Application, the better

- MVC is not a framework, but applications should be MVC, no matter what framework/approach you take [that's a *whole* other blog post I've been thinking about for a while now!]

At the end of the day, no matter what framework/style/approach you take, if you are going to create a non-trivial application, there is still a lot of work to do! Even if you use one of the plethora of code-gen tools out there, you will still have a lot of leg work!

Near the end of the podcast (64mins) there is some great talking about what these guys would like to see in Flex/Framework in the future.

Well done Matt and Peter for setting this up, and thank you!

I also listened to this one, which is great for a more in-depth on Cairngorm: www.theflexshow.com: Universal-Mind-Cairngorm-Extensions-w-Thomas-Burleson

Enjoy!