Cairngorm, good to the last drop, or just a drop in the bucket of other frameworks

Well tonight I, along with my comrade in arms Brian, braved the wintery weather of NYC to go to a Flex conference hosted by the New York Flex User Group. This was my first visit to the group and I am fairly new to flex so I thought that this would be a great opportunity to see what others are really doing with flex. Tonight's topic: Moving to Cairngorm, by Michal Glowacki. Right off the bat you can easily tell that Michal is quite intelligent. He was one of the cofounders of the Cairngorm framework (which was eventually bought out by Macrobe and is still in use today by Adobe).

Basically this framework works as a means of standardizing the location of code when developing projects. With this framework he breaks it up into three layers: View, Control and business logic (I know this is not what he said, I'll have to fix this later, but this is the essence of it). In short you put all your display code in one folder, the handling of 'gestures' (button clicks, mouse movements etc) in another, and any other business logic in a third. The really good part about this framework is that if you have multiple developers working on a flex project, they can all work on separate pieces without stepping on each other's toes. However, if you are a single developer or your application is very small, this is basically overkill. Michal opened by saying that if you include all of the Cairngorm libraries, your movie size will be 300k+ larger - yikes. Perhaps he meant source code size, but it wasn't clear. I know you can just import the libraries you need so that problem is out the window.

I won't delve too much into the actual presentation, but just a note for any future developer/presenters, not only does PowerPoint kill, but if you code an application from scratch in front of an audience, yes it is quite a feat, however it is boring as hell to watch. Just show the audience the end product and explain each piece, or save a few lines for the audience and then wow them with the result, or show a completed product and ask the audience for suggestions on what to build into it.

So overall here is a quick breakdown of Cairngorm:

• Great for multiple developers
• Crappy for single developer shops, or very small applications
• Don't bother retro fitting existing applications (Michal basically dodged a question as to whether it was worth rewriting existing applications)
• New applications or potentially complicated applications can benefit from a standardized framework of code - not necessarily Cairngorm, just a standard framework

[rant]NOW for the rant of the day - DO NOT come out with a radically different framework when going from version 2.0 to 2.1. That is just stupid. What good is a standardizing framework if it keeps changing??? UGGG - I won't be using this framework until version 20, or whenever they decide to make it consistant.[/rant].

OK any advocators of Cairngorm who wish to turn me around feel free to post. I just don't see it - maybe I'm just a flex neophyte, or maybe it was the cold weather (and stepping in a very cold puddle), but I just don't see it yet...

Want to play with Cairngorm:

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Cairngorm