Sunday, August 23, 2009

PureMVC

So I've just started work at new digital agency, and it's the second one in a row where there have been lots of people gushing over PureMVC. In the past I've also been asked by recruiters if it's something I know, so I finally decided to try to get my head round it.

I've put aside another project I was working on since it was too far progressed and started a new one that may be more suited. It's a take/rip-off on the cool Dice Wars game, which I've wanted to do for a while, mostly because the AI programming interests me. It's also not a game that should require too much cpu, so the added overhead of the framework (and my mistakes in using it) shouldn't interfere too much. Also it's closer to an app or website than most of the games I do with lots of buttons, menus etc, so I hope it will actually be relevant to making sites in PureMVC.

My first impressions are... not great. It's about tripled the amount of code I think I'll need to write, and I've spent half of my time trying to work out where to stick what bit of code. My biggest issue is getting my head around the fact that in the tutorials I've read the controller/commands don't seem to do very much and most of the logic seems to be put in the proxies. I have a horrible feeling that if I were to show what I've done (and the final code) to a hardcore mvc guy they would facepalm.

Also what it makes me think is, do I really want to be a frameworks kind of programmer? There's nothing really that I can't do without frameworks, and for the projects I've been working on mostly up to now - micro-site, games etc I think they actually might be a hindrance. Am I just learning it so I can join the cool techie kids' gang? Or just to tick some boxes on a recruiter's form?

Anyway, I'm sure once I get my head round it I'll be spouting off about it to all the flash guys I know who haven't bothered with it. It's not what you know, it's the jargon.


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