Developing Flex RIAs with Cairngorm microarchitecture – Part 2: Keeping state on the client

Introducing the Cairngorm Store

Newcomers to Flex are encouraged to explore the Flex samples area of the Adobe Developer Connection.

Samples such as the Flex 3 Dashboard, the Flex 3 Component Explorer and even the Flex Store (Flex 2) offer an excellent opportunity to study the features of the Flex application framework. They demonstrate how to use layout containers, navigator containers, controls, effects, data binding, the Drag and Drop manager, form validation, and the History manager. The Flex Store, in particular, clearly demonstrates the component-development model of Flex, showing how to create loosely coupled components that integrate through an event-driven architecture. Exploring the Flex Store application is an excellent way to become familiar with declarative layout using MXML and business logic development using ActionScript.

The Cairngorm Store (see Figure 1) is a complete rebuild of the Flex Store that transformed it into a scalable, maintainable enterprise rich Internet application through Cairngorm.

Figure 1. The Cairngorm Store

As an RIA, The Cairngorm Store is just complex enough to benefit from a Cairngorm architecture. Indeed in Part 3, we demonstrate this tipping point by showing how, within the rearchitected Cairngorm application, you can add new functionality easily, more predictably, and with significantly less development risk than if you were to attempt to add functionality to a non-Cairngorm code base.

We will use this application as a guide to highlight the key features of Cairngorm throughout the next four parts of this series.

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