Flex Article

Developing Flex RIAs with Cairngorm microarchitecture – Part 1: Introducing Cairngorm

A brief history of Cairngorm

If we can see further, it is because we are standing on the shoulders of giants.

When Alistair McLeod and Steven cofounded the software consultancy iteration::two, we recognized that many of the design challenges faced and successfully solved in the world of J2EE application development were still relevant issues in the world of RIA development. We came to this realization back in the days of RIA development with Flash, Flash Remoting, and J2EE—a period of RIA history that we'll look back upon with the same fondness and nostalgia as a C++ programmer has for 6809 assembly language.

Borrowing a subset of a collection of design patterns advocated by Sun Microsystems as the Core J2EE Pattern Catalog, we first presented our set of design patterns to the Flash community in our book, Reality J2EE: Architecting for Macromedia Flash MX (Pearson Education, 2003). To accompany the release of Flash MX 2004, we presented the patterns in Macromedia Flash MX 2004 ActionScript 2.0 Dictionary (Macromedia Press, 2003) in a chapter titled "ActionScript 2.0 Design Patterns for RIA Development".

As the RIA technology platform matured from the design-centric approach of Flash towards the declarative programming model of Flex, most of the motives for applying these patterns remained. The Flex programming model, however, offered us even more elegant ways to implement these patterns. Furthermore, some patterns that we considered exceptionally valuable to Flash RIA developers (such as the View Helper pattern) became less relevant in the Flex RIA world, leading us instead to advocate new Flex-specific patterns of our own, such as the Model Locator pattern.

Back at MAX 2004 we announced our decision to release the Cairngorm framework as an open-source project for Flex; that decision has since led to its successful and widespread adoption within the community.

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