{Confusion}

I’ve been doing more work in Flex recently and I have become increasingly dissatisfied with some of the features. The technology itself isn’t the problem. It’s the design trap that it creates.

Binding makes it seemingly so easy to feed data into your view that you can get very carried away with it. You can end up with mxml components which declare other components and use so many bindings to set various properties that you create an explosion of binding execution at runtime.

At this point I think class based “code behinds” that use property invalidation are much cleaner. You can ease the performance hit of your app by cutting down on the overhead of binding. You can eliminate all the script you would otherwise put in a script node to make your component more readable. You can also avoid actually writing business logic in your bindings. This leaves a very clean mxml component almost entirely dedicated to layout code. It may not be everything that Adobe envisioned but it’s certainly easier to read, understand, and maintain.

-Casey