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recommend anyone thinking of using Cairngorm to read a post by Steven Webster (Now on Adobe Feeds), also read this (its out of date somewhat, but the concept is still in tact), furthermore check out the Roundtable discussion on Coldfusion weekly, which provides some other insights to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 was browsing through my daily digest this morning and found two things that I thought are worth listening to.  There are two new podcast on Flex Frameworks, one is from The Flex Show w/ Thomas Burleson talking about Cairngorm and Universal Minds Cairngorm Extensions. I havent used these extensions myself yet, but after listening to the podcast, Tom talks about a lot of things I run into using Cairngorm.  As a serious user of Cairngorm and other design patterns I plan on using these puppies in the very near future along with Transfer.  My goal is that it will make me more effecient and I can leverage some more best practices when building RIA Apps in Flex/AIR.

The second podcast I listened two was from Coldfusion Weekly, the topic is Flex frameworks and there is a pretty good round table discussion on the topic, honestly I havent heard a poor round table discussion from these guys yet (nice job!)....

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