Recently, a coworker asked me – ‘What’s Robotlegs all About?’. I waved my hands around a bit, rambled about dependency injection, Spring, Swiz, until his eyes glazed over. Talking about frameworks only goes so far.

Enter Richard Lord’s fantastic AS3 framework comparison using Flexcaster, an example podcast application. Its a pretty simple example, but it compares the syntax and structure of a variety of frameworks including Robotlegs, PureMVC, Swiz, Cairngorm, as well as pure Flex 3 – all using a simple, uniform example.

Comparing the level of complexity, simply from a class-count, is a pretty interesting exercise. Check out these numbers!

• Flex 3 – 13 Classes
• PureMVC – 28 classes
• Robotlegs – 30 classes (!)
• Cairngorm – 20 classes
• Swiz – 18 classes

To the framework’s defense, they are designed to scale to much larger projects, and its not entirely an apples-to-apples comparison. Robotlegs, for example, demonstrates two different feed implementations, and has a slightly different UI class model than the Flex 3 example. The Swiz example, eschews the Command pattern, and instead uses singletons. Its definitely an eye-opener to compare how they differ.