FlexDaddy » cairngorm

Cairngorm has a new home

Andrew Spaulding — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 07:32:22 +0000

As promised by Steven Webster, Cairngorm is now available on Adobe Labs!
For simplicity you can use http://www.adobe.com/go/cairngorm/ which will be adopted as the standard URL.

Without stealing the spotlight, I’d like to point you back to Steven’s blog. Well done team!

Cairngorm Series on Flex DevNet

Andrew Spaulding — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 01:03:10 +0000

Be sure to check out the series of articles on the Flex DevNet – Developing Flex RIA’s with Cairngorm Microarchitecture written by Steven Webster of Adobe Consulting (formerly iteration::two).

This series of 6 articles are focussed around Cairngorm 0.99 and Flex 1.5, but the same principles can be applied when using Flex 2 and the new Cairngorm 2.0 Alpha release. Using a framework such as Cairngorm really keeps your code disciplined, allows for reusability, ease of architecture/design/planning, and a clean implementation of MVC. It gives you a direction to start heading when developing an application using Adobe Flex. Of course larger scale applications can be written without Cairngorm, but if you’re familiar with MVC then Cairngorm provides a great starting ground with a fantastic direction to follow.

Keep an eye out for a subsequent realease of articles that will cover Cairngorm with Flex 2. Nice work Steven.

Cairngorm 2.0 Alpha

Andrew Spaulding — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 23:14:35 +0000

Check out the new Cairngorm 2.0 micro-architecture release that has aligned with the current releases of the new Flex 2.0 beta product line.

Be sure to read both articles on the Adobe Consulting EMEA (iteration::two) blog:

Kudos to the members of Adobe Consulting EMEA, in particular Alex Uhlmann and Alistair McLeod for their hard work in porting Cairngorm to ActionScript 3.

MVC for Actionscript 2

Andrew Spaulding — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 09:07:50 +0000

I’ll be attending the MVC for Actionscript 2 Master Class run by the team at Rocketboots this Friday 9th September.

The class will cover a range of topics including:

The Value of Code
Design Patterns
MVC Patterns
The benefits of MVC
Cairngorm / ARP

It should be a great overview of MVC design patterns and architectures available for both Flex and Flash RIA’s. Be sure to check out the post over at Rocketboots, or drop me a line and i’ll see if I can answer your questions

Strongly type a CF return using Cairngorm

Andrew Spaulding — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 07:32:16 +0000

Working with Flex and ColdFusion can introduce a few problems regarding the way AMF handles the deserialization of CF structs (or objects) on the return from a remoting call. Non String types returned as Strings, Date types only working when they feel like it, the confusion with lower case versus upper case variable names – you’ve all heard it before.

I discussed the solution with Robin Hilliard of Rocketboots, and to quote him –

The value of typing the return is to ensure that throughout the rest of your client application you are working with an instance of the appropriate VO type and not just a vanilla Object with String properties, which is what remoting will hand to you from ColdFusion.

You may otherwise encounter hard-to-trace errors (e.g. missing getter/setter logic) caused by assuming that you had a real VO.

Nicely said.

To counter this my Value Objects have upper case variable names, strongly typed attributes, and a copy contructor which again strongly types the vanilla object returned from CF. See the following example:

[as]// Person Value Object

import org.nevis.cairngorm.vo.ValueObject

class com.flexdaddy.samples.vo.person.PersonVO
implements ValueObject
{
public var GIVEN_NAME:String = “”;
public var FAMILY_NAME:String = “”;

public function PersonVO( o:Object )
{
this.GIVEN_NAME = String( o.GIVEN_NAME );
this.FAMILY_NAME= String( o.FAMILY_NAME);
}
}[/as]

To call this copy contructor and cast our result object as a strongly typed Value Object, we can make a slight change to the behaviour of the Delegate. Rather than sending the CF result directly back to the calling command, it is neccessary to cast the Value Object from within the delegate as we are dealing with a ColdFusion issue.

The following code sample introduces an onResult method inside the delegate, as well as a filterResult method which returns our nicely constructed Value Object. In order to make this work we need to set the delegates onResult method as the resultHandler for the pending call. This then calls the onResult in the responder (the calling command).

[as]// User Detail Sample Delegate

import mx.utils.Delegate;
import org.nevis.cairngorm.business.Responder;
import org.nevis.cairngorm.business.ServiceLocator;
import com.flexdaddy.samples.vo.person.PersonVO

class com.flexdaddy.samples.business.GetUserDetailsDelegate
{
public function GetUserDetailsDelegate( responder:Responder )
{
this.service = ServiceLocator.getInstance().getService( “myService” );
this.responder = responder;
}

public function getUserDetails() : Void
{
var pendingCall = service.getUserDetails();
pendingCall.resultHandler = Delegate.create( this, this.onResult );
pendingCall.faultHandler = Delegate.create( responder, responder.onFault );
}

public function onResult( event:Object ) : Void
{
responder.onResult( filterResult(event.result) );
}

public function filterResult( result:Object ) : PersonVO
{
return new PersonVO( result );
}

private var responder:Responder;
private var service:Object;
}[/as]

Now our command will receive a strongly typed Value Object and it’s business as usual

Building RIA’s with Flex and Cairngorm

Andrew Spaulding — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 11:12:23 +0000

The team at Rocketboots in Sydney, Australia recently put together a Breeze presentation as part of the Macromedia Australia/New Zealand Community Seminars. Presented by Robin Hilliard, the presentation addressed the basic MVC architecture that Cairngorm is built upon, whilst also demonstrating how this can assist with protecting code, code reusability, and hence how this can increase your code value.

A sample appliction was built using a coldfusion backend and the Cairngorm Platform. This proved as a great introduction for those new to the architecture.

You can download the sample code or follow the link to the breezo. Check it out!