What’s so cool about Cairngorm

I’ve been using Cairngorm for well over a year now. Why Cairngorm? Well, it’s not because I think that Cairngorm is the only good way to build Flex apps. It may not even be the best way; at least two reviewers have concluded that Cliff Hall’s PureMVC is the best Flex application framework around. In fact, I’ve mentioned some of my own misgivings about the framework in a previous post.

Having said that, I do think Cairngorm is a very effective way to build maintainable applications. Cairngorm apps are very easy to modify - whether you’re adding, changing, or removing functionality. Cairngorm also lends itself to use by multidisciplinary development teams, and is sufficiently intuitive that new team members can to get up to speed fairly quickly.

Let me give you a case in point. I recently had to hand one of my Cairngorm applications over to another developer. He’s a sharp programmer, and has lots of experience with Java and JavaScript (among other things) but he had never even smelled Flex before. He spent a few days reading up about Flex and Cairngorm and looking through my application. At that point, he was able to be productive immediately. Without any coaching from me, he implemented no less than three new pieces of functionality in a very short time - which is testimony to how intuitive Cairngorm is.

Another point to be made is that while the other developer was adding new functionality to the application, I was debugging some existing functionality. The fact that the application was built using Cairngorm made it very easy for us to work concurrently without getting in each other’s way.

And that’s what’s really cool about Cairngorm: for all of its warts, it does make applications very easy to maintain and extend.

But as cool as it is, I’m still not ready to commit to using it exclusively. I’m going to be taking a deeper look at the other frameworks - particularly PureMVC - and see how they compare. Stay tuned.