Apache – Does Flex require PHP framework

Flash and Flex both use the same underlying rendering engine, just with different front-ends. Flash is better suited for making movies and animations. Flex is better for application development.

After using, in turn, all three of frameworks you listed, I can easily conclude that Mate is by far the superior framework. Of course, that's only my opinion and determining what makes a framework superior differs depending on your requirements.

To me, Mate's most appealing feature is how well it separates the different tiers of your application. After becoming familiar with it, I could never go back to using a framework that makes extensive use of global-state "Singletons" (Cairngorm, PureMVC).

However, Mate can probably be a bit difficult getting started with as the documentation is still a bit lacking and outdated, making it hard to know where to find the newest information. Some of the best practices and approaches that have been ironed out are to be found in the Mate forums, requiring some digging through posts. One of the most active users on that forum, Theo, has written a very good summary on the benefits of Mate in the following post:

Flex MVC Frameworks