Datasheet

Chapter 1: Introducing Cairngorm

Essentially, as Flash started introducing such capabilities as remoting, it started to face many of the same

challenges previously faced in the world of J2EE RIA development. Therefore, many of the same

solutions applied in the world of J2EE were now applicable to Flash development. By solutions , we are

referring to design patterns, the specifics of which will be covered in the next chapter.

It was not until later that the aforementioned ideas were applied to the Flex framework in the book

entitled Developing Rich Clients with Macromedia Flex (Steven Webster and Alistair McLeod, Macromedia

Press, 2004). This was the first book on best practices for enterprise RIA development with Adobe Flex.

Since then Cairngorm has become one of the best - known frameworks for Flex development, and at the

time of this writing it is the only one found on the Adobe Open Source web site. It officially became an

open source project at the Macromedia MAX2004 conference in New Orleans in November 2004.

The first open source release of the Cairngorm framework was labeled the 0.95 version for Flex 1.5, with

an updated 0.99 version (with new features) released soon thereafter.

The version at the time of writing is Cairngorm 2.2, released on April 30, 2007.

You can read about future plans for Cairngorm in a blog post by Steven Webster at

http://weblogs

.macromedia.com/swebster/archives/2008/08/cairngorm_3_-_a.html

Overview of Cairngorm

This section is meant as a broad overview of the major components that make up the Cairngorm

framework. Subsequent chapters will examine each of these parts in more detail.

Cairngorm Source Code

Because it is an open source project on the Adobe Open Source web site, you have full access to the source

code for Cairngorm. The code is stored in a Subversion repository. Directions for installing a Subversion

client and for checking out the code can be found at

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/

cairngorm/Get+Source+Code

It is not necessary to check out the source code for the purposes of this book, but if you want to, that

option is available to you.

Cairngorm Organization and Documentation

The documentation and class structure outline for Cairngorm can be found at http://cairngormdocs

.org/docs/cairngorm_2_2_1/index.html

Much like the standard Flex framework, Cairngorm ’ s classes are organized into packages. These are:

com.adobe.cairngorm

com.adobe.cairngorm.business

com.adobe.cairngorm.commands

com.adobe.cairngorm.control

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