When I started to get in to Flex several years ago, I bought the only Flex book available at the time and got cracking.

The guys who had written the book had also written a framework, so I started using it. It seemed a little complicated at times, but it worked. After we built a few apps with it at CFI, we decided it wasn't for us; too much boilerplate for too little reward.

We started to discuss the fact that maybe we didn't need a framework for Flex as much as some best practices to follow. Flex introduced some obstacles we weren't familiar with, such as 100% asynchronous operation, so we winged it for a bit.

Then we came across Joe Berkovitz's post on MVCS. I drew a lot of inspiration from Joe's simple, framework-free approach to Flex development when I first came across this application. As many of you know, I have been blogging about this for a while, and will be discussing my findings in simplified framework-free Flex development at cf.objective() 2008 later this year.

Well, Joe has recently blogged to provide quick and easy reference links regarding his approach, plus some updated thoughts to best practices he has learned over time since his original article on Adobe's Flex developer connection. I'm very interested in looking at these as I refine my personal approach to Flex apps, and the content of my presentation in May.

There must be some interest in doing Flex framework-free across the community, since I was recently asked permission to republish my most recent blog post on this topic by a an online Flex news source. The editors and I decided that I would finish my sample app and write a full article instead, to provide some more substance/examples of the information being presented.

Thanks go to Joe for sharing his experience, being my original inspiration in this area, and giving Flex developers some alternative best practices from the existing Flex frameworks.