Laura Arguello on Mate, Mango and Flex Camp Miami

Flex Camp Miami is only 16 days away (so register today!). As part of my ongoing series of posts interviewing the speakers for the event, today I interview Laura Arguello of ASFusion. Laura and Nahuel are the creators of the Mate Flex framework. Laura is a well known blogger as well as an extremely accomplished developer including winning awards such as the Mary Murray Outstanding Computer Scientist Award at the University of California, Irvine, and the Adobe Flex Derby contest in 2006.

Brian Rinaldi
Your is about the Mate Flex framework, which, as you know I have been a fan of for a while. Can you give readers who may not know a description of what the Mate Flex framework is about?

Laura Arguello
In few words, Mate is a tag-based, event-driven framework created specifically for Flex.
It allows you to "wire" your application together by the use of events and dependency injection. In general, you use events to handle user interaction, and dependency injection to handle data distribution throughout your application.

Brian Rinaldi
You partly answered my second question there, but given that Cairngorm has been the 100-lb-gorilla of Flex frameworks for some time, can you explain why you and Nahuel Foronda decided to create the framework? What benefits does it provide over Cairngorm? (not to start any framework flame-wars or anything)

Laura Arguello
We usually try not to enter into comparisons, but since you asked...

Obviously, we created Mate because we were not satisfied by the current offerings, which was Cairngorm at that time. We believe that Mate makes things simpler, and because it is non-prescriptive, it lets you develop in whatever way you feel most comfortable. It is also very declarative, so by looking into only one place, you will have a good idea of how events are handled and where the data goes.

Brian Rinaldi
I have had people ask me this question, in part because I have written about Cairngorm in the past and in part because Universal Mind has often advocated Cairngorm. My comparison is similar to yours. I generally point out that while its great Mate doesn't dictate how you do things, you do have to be careful with setting some guidelines.

Laura Arguello
Definitely. But that has to be a decision you and your team make, not a dictate from AsFusion.

Brian Rinaldi
Agreed.

Laura Arguello
Having said all that, we are asked more and more to write some kind of blueprint of what an application written in Mate would look like. I don't think it should or will be a final guideline, but it will help bringing some important concepts of Mate to light. Also, any time you engage into such a thought process, you get new ideas to simplify things, so I can imagine that it will help making the framework better.

Brian Rinaldi
True. That sounds like a good idea.

I have noticed a lot of talk about Mate lately at conferences and in publications. Have you been pointed to any significant public applications built with Mate that you can share?

Laura Arguello
For some reason, it is always difficult to find public-facing Flex apps. I know people have already been using it and some others are migrating some cool apps to Mate. There is one I know really well and that is the Universal Mind website.

Brian Rinaldi
You also created the Mango Blog application that currently runs my personal site and my Flex Camp sites for both Boston and Miami. Do you have any plans you can share for the future of Mango Blog?

Laura Arguello
Yes, and by the way, the Universal Mind website also runs on Mango for its content management system, and it communicates with it via remoting.

Brian Rinaldi
I didn't know that.

Laura Arguello
Yes, I am actually quite happy on how well the Flex app and Mango run together.

So going back to Mango, I am planning on releasing the new version, I think it will be 1.3, probably this week. There are some features provided by Seb Duggan and some bug fixes. But before releasing it, I am working on getting custom authentication working for it so that you can provide your own authentication system to enter into the admin. That will allow you to use LDAP or any other user management system you may already have in place.
I have to say that although I started working on that feature some time ago, I am kind of rushing to get it out because Ben Forta needs it.

Brian Rinaldi
Nice! Wish I had actually worked out my solution for turning TinyMCE on and off using that link. It works nicely on my local copy. I promise at some point to get to it.

Laura Arguello
Yeah, don't worry. By the way, Seb has added a button to enable and disable the editor. What I still need to check is how well it works when the post contains unescaped HTML characters.

Brian Rinaldi
Ah ok. So Seb beat me to it.

Lastly, readers may not know that you are coming to Flex Camp Miami all the way from the Los Angeles area. Hopefully you are planning on doing some sightseeing while in Miami.

Laura Arguello
I will! We are staying a couple days more and we are planning to go to the Keys. I've never been there, so it should be fun. I love snorkeling.

Brian Rinaldi
Great! Sounds like fun; hopefully the weather cooperates. Well, I, for one, am really looking forward to seeing your presentation. Thanks to you and Nahuel for making the long journey!

Laura Arguello
Thanks! The camp will be great, I am sure.