This example uses the Contact Manager, a (very) simple flex application, that I talked about in Part 1 "Contact Manager Part 1 - Remoting Example".   I took that application and modified it to use the Cairngorm framework - "Microarchitecture is a lightweight yet prescriptive framework for rich Internet application (RIA) development". 

Cairngorm was developed by the folks at Iteration two (now part of Adobe Consulting) and is pretty easy to use.  There are some drawbacks (some of which have been solved by UniversalMinds Cairngorm Extensions)  and I recommend anyone thinking of using Cairngorm to read a post by Steven Webster (Now on Adobe Feeds), also read this (its out of date somewhat, but the concept is still in tact), furthermore check out the Roundtable discussion on Coldfusion weekly, which provides some other insights to Cairngorm.  Normally you wouldnt use Cairngorm for something so simple as the Contact Manager, but for a large application Cairngorm can be very beneficial and worth the extra code.

Ok, so in Cairngorm you basically have the following design patterns in use (forgive me if I miss one, going on memory):

• MVC (model view and controller)
• Singleton Pattern
• Command Pattern
• Delegate Pattern (something they cooked up for Cairngorm)

Cairngorm is made up of these main sections (a good overview can be found here):

• ModelLocator
• Controller
• The applications views (mxml components)
• CairngormEventDispatcher, CairngormEvent
• Events
• Command
• Delegate
• ServiceLocator

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I put together a simple Flex application to show how easy it is to create a flash remoting flex application.  The app doesn't use a particular framework and I used the Flex CF Wizards to create all the ColdFusion code, which made my job really easy.  You have probably already noticed that the blog entry is labeled "Part 1", I plan on having three postings.  The first one (this one) will focus around a basic Flex application that uses Flash Remoting to talk to ColdFusion. In this example we wont bother with frameworks, we will try to use binding as much as possible, view states and some other basic Flex concepts. The second entry (Part 2) will take our Part 1 Flex application and will add a little more depth, such as adding a Cairngorm framework to the flex project. The third entry (Part 3) will migrate the Contact Manager that I do in Part 1 and move it over as an AIR application.   There might be a fourth posting on a Cairngorm AIR application, but to be honest I haven't worked with Cairngorm in AIR yet, so I plan on playing with it a little before I make another entry ;) . 

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