I am looking for a framework that can simplify the task of creating new Flash apps. But I don't want to go the Flex route because it's way too top-heavy for the simple widget apps that I need to create. (The payloads often exceed 300k with a Flex app and it can be difficult to control the timeline and animation, etc.)
When I Google the phrase "as3 mvc framework," I found PureMVC, but I don't know how good it is.
Are there any others that I should know about?
I've heard that PureMVC is a solid framework to work with.
Soma, with it's UI generator, looks pretty nice too.
PureMVC is pretty good - I've used it for a few projects and it's worked well. My biggest gripe is their naming scheme for things - which really, is pretty minor. Once nice thing about PureMVC is that they've made a version that works well with itself - so you can create multiple MVC "cores" that speak with each other.
I've heard decent things about FlashMVC as well, though I haven't used it.
I've used PureMVC extensively and it is great. My current choice is Robotlegs. Kind of a newcomer, but it provides the same structure as PureMVC without all of the boiler plate repetitive code PureMVC requires. It also eliminates the 4 singletons that PureMVC needs to function which makes it way easier to unit test.
Here are several articles I've written on Robotlegs.
Most of the examples are Flex based, but there is also a pure AS3 example in the examples repository on GitHub.
I second PureMVC. After you've used it and created your first application thinking in PureMVC will become second nature. And of course sharing code with other developers who 'speak' PureMVC makes collaboration much easier.
I've yet to try it (though I have gone through its documentation), but I've heard good things about Gaia (http://www.gaiaflashframework.com/).
More discussion here .. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37043/flex-mvc-frameworks
We are using Mate too