Have been flexing again and one of the biggest issues I have with Cairngorm or with the pattern is that my command is somehow slave of the view for which it is made. If a Command alters a model that is binded to a certain view, then the Commmand is actually changing the view. It doesn’t seem right. If another part of the application would use the command, then this view would also be changed… The Command should really notify the view that triggered the Command…

Are there articles on this because surely I’m not the first one with this issue…

Yow, Lieven Cardoen

If you are a good programmer and analist, then you need to be eager to learn design patterns, frameworks, other languages, … but more important learn when to use them and when not to use them.

@Herre: Thx for the sweet words on SminkedIn! You in Kortrijk Tuesday @ 12 o’clock? Belguim – Nigeria… We’re still looking for a TV…

Cheerio!

to summarise:
- use prana for creating commands/models/delegates/services/command-event mappings
- no more service locator
- no more modellocator
- inject model/delegate into command constructor
- inject service into delegate
- populate frontcontroller via prana
and make use of the event generators of um cairngorm as well as the callback mechanism to the views. Let prana manage the object ifecyles (no more crappy code for singletons whohooo!)

all set! A nice clean approach

now we have the basic architecture running we have to thourougly test it, but it seems to work very nice!

Christophe, we mailed before about prana. If the project goes on and the people i work for allow me i’ll show you some code. Maybe i can then finally contribute to prana…

keep up the good work!

Why wait for someone else to do it Adobe provided us with a good slim framework but it’s not for everyone and it might not be perfect but there is nothing stopping anyone from making it better for your needs.

I used both pureMVC and Cairngorm in multiple projects. It worked ok, but we decided to build our own layered architecture which fits much better our needs.
Problems I have with Cairngorm: – Commands(Transaction Scripts). This approach works fine if your application doesn´t get to big. As soon as you have 20+ Event Command pairs automatically, especially in big teams, code is duplicated and spread out over multiple not well structured classes immediately. Singletons, ModelLocator classes and so on -> They are absolutly not the right patterns if you need to implement unit tests and have to be quality focused in your development. Especially if you have quite big rich clients a more domain driven approach is more suitable at least for our cases. A clean speration of your concerns (e.g. presentation layer, domain layer, infrastructure layer) also will help you a lot when developing in big teams (5+). We are currently working in a team of 12 Flex-Developers and this approach already saved us lot of time and troubles during development. Just my 2 cent on this

http://weblogs.macromedia.com/swebster/archives/2008/08/cairngorm_3_-_a.html

Hopefully this will give some sense of what has been going on; we’ve been taking a step backwards so we can take many steps forward in collaboration with the community. We’ve been engaged with the guys at Universal Mind, with Eric’s AIR extensions, and with numerous customers and partners who also want some mechanism by which they can engage more directly in the direction of Cairngorm, and opensource.adobe.com was the obvious platform upon which we could achieve this.

We hear you. We really do

@Steven: I’m very curious about what you have to announce. Don’t keep us waiting too long My intention was not to start an “is evil” or “sucks” discussion, but I was merely using these terms to show how easily some developers ignore Cairngorm without really being able to argument why. In some cases I found that they actually know very little about the framework and that is what brought me to this post.

In general I agree with most of the issues that were mentioned here in the comments since I have dealt with them too and wrote a set of extensions myself to handle them. That’s why I find it strange that since so many people are having the same issues (and I think AC has these issues as well), there is no real answer coming from AC directly that offers a solution to these problems.

I wonder if there is any dialogue between the folks at Adobe Consulting and the UM team to see if some of the extensions can be incorporated into Cairngorm. My overall feeling is that although Cairngorm is opensource and there might be reaction from AC to the questions asked, the suggestions made about “improving” the framework often do not lead to action and that is I think what bothers me the most. With all do respect, but to me AC is too defensive about changing Cairngorm and that is what causes people to write and release their own extensions, or even start new frameworks. I’m certainly not saying that every little extension should be incorporated since it will only lead to a wildgrowth, but at least an effort should be made to engage some members of the community and let them have their say. I thought there was a Cairngorm Advisory Committee, but I don’t know if it still exists.

The most obvious issue will be updating the view from command by using only state variables. Although that can be a double edged sword as there are times when it works very well and times when not.

However, on the overall, I still prefer Cairngorm for now over PureMVC, for simplicity sake.