Welcome

Flex Application Design for Cairngorm

This will walk a developer through the process of designing a simple
Cairngorm based Flex application that addresses a real world business need. The
intended audience is a developer who is at least somewhat familiar with Flex, has
built a few Flex applications, is at least somewhat familiar with the Cairngorm micro
architecture, and wishes to learn more about how to plan a Cairngorm application
properly, right from the start of their development effort.

What is Cairngorm? Cairngorm is fundamentally a methodology for breaking up your
application code by logical functions; by data, by user views, and by the code that
controls everything. This is routinely referred to as MVC, or Model, View, and
Control.

The Pieces of Cairngorm
· Model Locator: Stores all of your application’s Value Objects (data) and
shared variables, in one place. Similar to an HTTP Session object, except that
its stored client side in the Flex interface instead of server side within a
middle tier application server.
· View: One or more Flex components (button, panel, combo box, Tile, etc)
bundled together as a named unit, bound to data in the Model Locator, and
generating custom Cairngorm Events based on user interaction (clicks,
rollovers, dragndrop.)
· Front Controller: Receives Cairngorm Events and maps them to Cairngorm
Commands.
· Command: Handles business logic, calls Cairngorm Delegates and/or other
Commands, and updates the Value Objects and variables stored in the Model
Locator
· Delegate: Created by a Command, they instantiate remote procedure calls
(HTTP, Web Services, etc) and hand the results back to that Command.
· Service: Defines the remote procedure calls (HTTP, Web Services, etc) to
connect to remote data stores.