A few months ago, I spoke with Kathleen Erickson and Mark Pillar of The Midnight Coders, about the potential synergies between PureMVC and their product WebORB.
WebORB is a server-side technology enabling connectivity between Flex, Flash and AJAX clients and Java, .NET, PHP and Ruby on Rails server applications. It allows you to develop your server-side applications and not sweat your choice of platform so much, since you could move your work to another WebORB supported platform with relative ease.
Similarly, with PureMVC being ported to a number of languages, you could easily move your client to another platform and know that your methodology would remain largely the same.
Thus, an application written in PureMVC on the client and WebORB on the server would have maximum freedom to vary either the client or server platform (or both) without a major burndown/rebuild on either side, since the methodologies remain the same. Sure there'd be migration work, but it would be straightforward, and your application architecture would not have to change much, if at all.
Proving this concept on the client side, Matt Brailsford (Owner of the PureMVC for C# port) recently reimplemented in PureMVC/Silverlight the classic PureMVC/Flex Login demo done by Jens Krause.
Anyway, Kathleen, Mark and I all agreed that working together, we could really serve our common audiences needs even better.
I promised to make a push for quality PureMVC/WebORB demos that show the power of the two in conjunction. There are already a number of these that are soon to be released when the new site is unveiled.
Meanwhile, Mark recently added AS3 code generator support for PureMVC in their WebORB for Java version. We worked together to create a demo that implements PureMVC framework best practices, and the structure of that code then became the basis for the templates that WebORB uses to generate code. Now when you define your model within their product it can actually generate a skeleton PureMVC project with the Proxies already defined for talking to the remote object service(s).
So if you are a PureMVC and WebORB afficianado, give the new WebORB for Java a spin and tell me what you think! If you come up with a good tutorial or demo for using PureMVC with WebORB, let me know: we've got virtually infinite repository space and we aim to use it!
-=Cliff>
PS: Thanks, Mark!
