Thanks for your input. The future of Cairngorm seems to look interesting from what you’d written. I am looking forward to it’s official release.

Please allow me to correct a few points re. Parsley and Cairngorm. You wrote that apparently Cairngorm will be pretty much like Parsley, but the truth is more subtle. Some of the Cairngorm beta libraries are implemented as Parsley extensions, because Parsley provides extensibility points that make it easy to create higher-level framework features. Also, the Cairngorm sample applications demonstrate some design patterns, such as the Presentation Model and Command, and in these Parsley is used as the underlying IoC container and messaging framework. We do find Parsley to be a mature and extensible framework, but that is not to discount the other frameworks, which offer their own distinguishing features and characteristics.

Cairngorm itself is undergoing a transformation. The committee acknowledges that the important patterns and practices for RIA development can be applied with a variety of frameworks, and IoC containers provide an elegant means. For instance, instead of declaring services in a Cairngorm service locator, one might declare them in an MXML Parsley config class, a Swiz BeanLoader or a Spring ActionScript XML file. Then the service can be injected into the delegates/commands/etc automatically instead of being retrieved though a locator. The mechanism for dependency-inversion has changed, but the separation of concerns and underlying design patterns remain.

So going forwards you can expect Cairngorm to become more focussed on patterns and practices. The Cairngorm Committee won’t seek to compete with all the latest frameworks, but rather to embrace and encourage them. Cairngorm will aim to provide guidance to help enterprises deliver large Flex projects successfully and where possible this will be framework agnostic. This transition is very much in progress, but we hope the result will promote the continuing development of frameworks, from the trend towards inversion-of-control containers, to the emerging modularity frameworks, like Potomac and Adobe Gravity.

I was a good presentation, you made it look really simple. Thanks for the slides and thanks for clarifying on SmartyPants.

Tom