Agile Enterprise Application Development with Flex

Cairngorm

The architectural framework Cairngorm was created by Alistair McLeod and Steven Webster while they were working at the company iteration::two (they are presently employed by Adobe Consulting). Cairngorm implements several design patterns such as MVC, Command, and Delegate. It was open sourced in the summer of 2008.

Cairngorm was designed to ensure that UI components do not need to know where data is located. The business layer retrieves data from the servers and stores it in the memory objects that represent the data model, which use binding to notify the UI components about data arrival or changes. On the same note, changes in the UI are propagated to the server side through this business layer.

The Cairngorm framework promotes the use of the MVC design pattern in the client portion of your RIA. It offers a number of classes implementing Model, View, and Controller tiers, and interaction between them.

The Model tier is represented by the class ModelLocator, which stores the application-specific data (these are often collections of value objects, a.k.a. data transfer objects). ModelLocator’s data is bound to the View controls.

The View portion contains visual components required by your application, value objects, and Cairngorm-specific event classes used for communication with the Model and Controller tiers.

The Controller tier is responsible for invoking appropriate code containing the business logic of your application, which is implemented by using global FrontController ...