I just finished putting together RokTok, a Flex mashup that combines Last.fm data with the Twitter Search API to discover what people are saying about their favorite musicians and bands. Though I had a lot of fun playing with particle systems and making them behave in interesting ways using the Flint library, the reason I started working on this app was to learn the Mate framework.
Mate is a light framework that makes wiring up an application’s models and views easy. It uses Flex’s native MXML and binding in a way that feels totally natural, and unlike many other popular frameworks (I’m looking at you Cairngorm and PureMVC), it doesn’t create its own form of events to get the job done. I personally prefer to use a framework to gain a loose organization than to follow the strictest design patterns, so Mate’s flexibility was a perfect fit. I’m all for following best practices, but if that means I have to create a million commands and spend more time writing the framework code than my application, then I’m not interested, you know? Somehow Mate seemed to keep me organized while still making me feel like the application was taking shape quickly. I dig that.
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