Cairngorm is an implementation of design patterns that the consultants at Adobe Consulting have successfully taken from enterprise software development (with technologies including J2EE and .NET) and applied rich Internet application development using Adobe Flex.
Cairngorm is available for both Flex 1.5 and the newly-released Flex 2 framework. All current efforts are focused on the version for Flex 2 and all references to Cairngorm in this article refer to Cairngorm for Flex 2, unless otherwise stated.
The Cairngorm microarchitecture is intended as a framework for Enterprise RIA developers.
First and foremost, this assumes that developers are likely to be delivering their applications on the Adobe Flex platform. As an ActionScript 2 and ActionsScipt 3 technical architecture, Cairngorm has been used, and can continue to be used, for the rapid development of applications built with Flash MX and Flash Remoting.
However, the implementation of the design patterns (the patterns that have been selected for the microarchitecture) and the future roadmap for Cairngorm development are firmly aligned with the feature set - advertised and anticipated - of the Adobe Flex platform, and the emerging ecosystem of tools (such as Apollo) around the Flex platform.
If you are writing a very simple application (such as a prototype application) or an application with only a single view, then you might consider a "Model 1" solution that doesn't strive for the same separation of model, view, and control that Cairngorm advocates.
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 development team that includes designers as well as creative and technical developers.
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