Flex Spaghetti

We were playing internally with a Flex project and after our first Scrum sprint we ended up with a real nice looking frontend, ... but also with Flex Spaghetti! All kind of events were bubbling up and down through the application.

After searching the internet I noticed a lot of people are having the same problems. Using a framework or a blueprint architecture should help us. In Java we have a lot of frameworks to choose from, each with it's advantages and disadvantages. On the Flex side the number of mature frameworks is limited. For me this is a sign that (professional) Flex development is in it's early stages. However there are some frameworks. Luke Bayes and Ali Mills made a nice comparison of the available frameworks. Cairngorm and PureMVC scored best in this comparison and so I tried them both. I prefer PureMVC as it's much cleaner using the Mediator pattern. This allows to send event backs to the view eaily and clean as well.

In my free time I also started to experiment a little bit with AIR and it's embedded SQLite database engine. This is useful for storing local data in offline mode but also for creating small stand-alone applications like a personal Movie database. When talking to a database I'm used (and spoiled ;-) to Grails ORM (GORM) or Spring's JDBCTemplate and HibernateTemplate. There is nothing like this available in Flex/ActionScript. To write GORM in ActionScript is not an option, but to port Spring's JdbcTemplate to a SqliteTemplate in ActionScript was doable on a nice summer evenning. I'm currently in talks with Cliff Hall of the PureMVC project to add this as an utility to the PureMVC project. If you are interested in in the meantime, just leave your email address and I will send you a copy.

Grails for creating quick mock applications

Currently I'm working on an Adobe Flex front-end which will communicate to Microsoft Team Foundation Server using some SOAP webservices.

As we are currently just concentrating on the Flex front-end, there are no TFS webservices available yet. This makes testing the Flex front-end somehow difficult. To make things easy we wanted to create some mock TFS webservices. This is when Grails comes is!

Within the hour we had the mock application running. Creating some basic domain classes, installing the xfire plugin and creating some services exposed as xfire webservices. And for verifying the data is stored correctly in the database we just used the generate-all command to create some basic CRUD views.

I know the Grails mock application will not see the production light, but creating quick mock applications for temporary usage is another thing in which Grails can be used very effectively.