The Penne Pasta for Flex 3

Posted in Frameworks by Mohammed Khan on 10. November 2008

As i mentioned in my earlier post that i wanted to write about how i enjoyed having penne pasta. So here it is. A few days back i had some new developers joined in Rajan and Saravanan, who had previously tried only having dishes listed on menu prepared by chefs from Adobe. Now preparing dishes (writing code) for my guest (clients) using the Cairngorm spice takes up a lot of time. And to work with cairngorm based dishes (projects) requires a real good taste and understanding of MVC. Just to prepare an appetizer (small project) with cairngorm spice requires one to prepare several garnishing (write classes) items for it. And this could get worse when you want to prepare a menu which has lot of appetizers, soups, main course and desserts (ui interactions, classes, functions). And also my new helping hands (team members) Rajan and Saravanan wanted some time to understand the real recipe (code structure) behind a main course (already developed project) and they came back with a timeline as 10 days to understand all the ingredients used in the recipe. And my guest (client) couldn’t wait that long. So i had to look for ingredients which are simple, adds good taste (improves the code) to the main recipe and also my existing kitchen helpers (existing project team) could work with it. (I think I should now stop speaking Gordon Ramsay’s language)

So i had started evaluating frameworks which i had used earlier and are new on web. During this i hit upon the Penne Framework which is quite new on the web but it immediately grabbed my interest for the following reasons :

1. As my project team members have experience with Cairngorm, i had to look for something which was very much inline with it and reduces time to implement. Penne could just do that.

2. Also for large projects the cairngorm framework simply adds up several unnecessary classes which affects the final build size. By unnecessary classes I mean are the controller and command class ( I always hated this part of Cairngorm). And Penne was just filling my appetite rightly. It gives me the freedom for not using the command and controller classes and directly dispatching the services from my view classes while still maintaing the mvc pattern.

3. Also i had one member on team who was working with only design related work with Flex, and whenever i introduced him to Cairngorm he hardly showed any progress on it, because it was too hard from him to digest all the classes involved with Cairngorm based projects. But when I ran a session with my team members on Penne, even this guy quickly adopted. When i asked him how was he finally able to do it, he said he hardly had to learn anything. He was now able to work on service integration tier without worrying about the service wrapper classes.

Once I was confident that my other team members would be able to work with it, we started using it on our current assignment and believe me I had a positive result and a good response from my client. To know more about Penne framework and how it works out you can visit this site , this site also has the penne diagram explorer, as you have one for the cairngorm. So Bon Appetit !!!

1 Comment »