Professional Cairngorm™

29.1. Review

In this book you took an in-depth look at the Cairngorm framework. Let's take a moment to review the topics that were covered in this book.

29.1.1. Foundations of Cairngorm

In Chapter 1 you were given a broad overview of Cairngorm, starting with a basic definition: Cairngorm is a lightweight micro-architecture for the rapid development of RIAs.

Then you were given a brief history of Cairngorm, which goes as far back as Flash MX. Cairngorm evolved from principles and practices used in Java RIA development that became applicable to Flash with the introduction of remoting capabilities.

Next you were given a broad overview of the packages that make up Cairngorm. These are:

• com.adobe.cairngorm

• com.adobe.cairngorm.business

• com.adobe.cairngorm.commands

• com.adobe.cairngorm.control

• com.adobe.cairngorm.model

• com.adobe.cairngorm.view

• com.adobe.cairngorm.vo

Then we looked at the major components of Cairngorm:

• ModelLocator

• ServiceLocator

• Commands

• Events

• FrontController

• Value objects

• Delegates

Next we examined the basic logic flow of Cairngorm, which can be summarized as follows:

Some action causes a Cairngorm event to be dispatched. The FrontController intercepts this event and calls the execute function of a corresponding command class. The command class decides how the event will be handled. If remote data needs to be accessed, the command class uses a delegate to access the remote data. When any remote calls are completed, the command updates the ModelLocator. Changes to the ModelLocator ...