Professional Cairngorm™

1.1. What Is Cairngorm?

Depending on what source you go to, you will find varying descriptions of what Cairngorm is.

The Adobe Labs web site (the current home of the Cairngorm project) describes it as follows:

Cairngorm is the lightweight micro-architecture for Rich Internet Applications built in Flex or AIR. A collaboration of recognized design patterns, Cairngorm exemplifies and encourages best-practices for RIA development advocated by Adobe Consulting [and] encourages best-practice leverage of the underlying Flex framework, while making it easier for medium to large teams of software engineers [to] deliver medium to large scale, mission-critical Rich Internet Applications (http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/cairngorm/Cairngorm).

The Wikipedia entry for Cairngorm has the following description:

Cairngorm is based on the MVC model. It is specifically designed to facilitate complex state and data synchronization between the client and the server, while keeping the programming of the View layer detached from the data implementation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairngorm_(Flex_framework)).

A further description of its intended use can be found at http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/cairngorm/About:

The Cairngorm micro-architecture is intended as a framework for Enterprise RIA developers.... The benefits of the Cairngorm architecture are realized when developing complex RIA applications with multiple use-cases and views, with a team of developers, and with a multi-disciplinary ...