Since the boom and popularization of the rich Internet applications (RIAs) the developers have been busy innovating and extracting optimum power from the RIA development technologies. The Flex development community too hasn’t been far behind it the race, as there have been significant contributions to the web development industry in form of state-of the-art RIAs built on power-packed Flex frameworks and MVC architectures.

After Adobe released its RIA development platform – Flex, as open source the technology generated a buzz and soon a wave of acceptance followed. Flex developers started creating small apps that would ease everyday living and provide a high user experience from the web applications. This trend gradually picked up pace and evolved rapidly into a more mature form where the developers were able to build enterprise applications for the organization-wide business processing. Building an enterprise application is never an easy task as it requires multiple professionals to work in tandem and deliver a collaborative application that is composed of individually functioning components. The code is large and very hard to manage and hence some of the Flex development frameworks are becoming a mainstream of the Flex developer community. These are the open source Flex application development frameworks which are widely used for RIA development using the Adobe Flex platform:

Cairngorm – Cairngorm is a Flex framework which is present since the time of Flex itself. Over the years it has matured significantly and now promises a Flex developer to create superior and scalable RIAs with layered MVC implementation to manage complex business logic and intricate codes easily. This is easily the most widely used Flex development framework by the Flex developers.

PureMVC – PureMVC Flex framework belongs more to an ActionScript developer than to the Flex developer. This independent framework can be used to implement applications built on Flash, Flex, or ActionScript alike. This Flex framework supports the MVC design pattern to code with three separate but interdependent layers of Model, View and Controller. This framework is very well documented and its web site contains very rich information to help developers get started.

Model-Glue: Flex – Model-Glue: Flex framework is another simple MVC based Flex framework. Joe Rinehart, the author of original Model-Glue for ColdFusion ported it to Flex. There are positive comments about Model-Glue: Flex. It’s design to be more lightweight than framework such as Cairngorm and PureMVC, which makes it easier for quick prototyping or simple Flex application development.

Foundry – The ServerBox Foundry (sbasfoundry ) is another of the ActionScript 3 / Java framework designed for Flex RIA development. Foundry is designed and implemented for mid to large scale enterprise RIA system development. It includes Java common module to tight integration between Foundry flex plug-in and server side processes.

Guasax Flex Framework – Guasax is an ease of use programming framework to provide ordered and scalable Flex applications. Life cycle of Guasax framework is based in the MVC pattern to take on our program actions. A unique feature to Guasax is that the use of XML files to configure the actions in the business logic, which reassemble some aspects of Java Struts framework. Guasax can be extended by developing Guasax components.

ARP – Aral Balkan initially developed ARP (Ariaware RIA Platform) an ActionScript based framework and now it’s hosted as one of Open Source Flash projects. ARP currently supports Macromedia Flash and Flex based RIA Development in ActionScript 2 and ActionScript 3.

Flest Framework

Flest is an ActionScript3 / Flex application development framework for building enterprise level RIAs. It uses such design patterns as Controller, Factory, Command, etc. High efficiency, simplicity and practicality were set as its mandatory design features. Flest Framework was designed and built to be a lightweight and easy to use toolset that helps to structure the Flex development environment on the one hand, and gives a developer maximum freedom in making his own decisions on the other.