Professional Cairngorm™

1.6. Benefits of Using Cairngorm

Now that you have a basic idea of the structure, components, and application logic flow of a Cairngorm project, it's time to examine some of the benefits the framework provides.

In the "Flex 3: Introducing Cairngorm" article cited earlier, the following purposes of Cairngorm are defined:

• Cairngorm is an approach to organizing and partitioning:

  • Code and packages

  • Component functionality and roles

• Cairngorm is a "best practice" methodology for Flex software design and development.

• Cairngorm encourages developers to identify, organize, and separate code based on its roles/responsibilities.

Many of these points have already been mentioned in the quoted descriptions of Cairngorm earlier in this chapter, but what has not been discussed are the benefits that arise from this organization and best-practices methodology.

The "Flex 3: Introducing Cairngorm" article outlines several benefits of using Cairngorm. These include:

• Cairngorm is ideal for team development, since it allows designers, component developers, and data-services developers to work in parallel.

• Maintenance, debugging, and the adding or updating of features are easier than with a project created using just the standard Flex framework.

Both of these benefits arise from the organization provided by the Cairngorm framework.

Since code is organized by roles/responsibilities and is implemented via the Cairngorm methodology, designers can be working on views while component developers and service developers ...