Technology and Experience Innovation

There’s now a new easy-to-remember URL for Cairngorm, which we’ll adopt as the URL we’ll use in any communications/emails. You can now send people to http://www.adobe.com/go/cairngorm. Thanks to the Adobe web-team for arranging this for us, despite the myriad of other changes they’ve had to do for the Flex Release today!

I’m hugely excited that Cairngorm 2 is

now available for download from Adobe Labs, complete with a new home at http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Cairn

gorm

A number of the Adobe Consulting team have contributed greatly to the Cairngorm 2 project,

either directly (by working on getting this packaged for distribution on labs) or indirectly by

working with the technology day-in and day-out on customer engagements. I’m sure the team will

have their own thoughts and blog entries to share with you in the days and weeks ahead, and look

forward to their contributions.

More importantly, I’m deeply excited by the infrastructure of Adobe Labs as an enabling

technology by which the community can now become pivotal in contribution. We’ve put in place a

framework structure on Adobe Labs, that we’ll monitor and grow over time to embrace the work

that the community has done around our offering. We’ll be looking to the community to share

ownership in the documentation around Cairngorm, the sample examples around Cairngorm, as well

as the links to resources that you find useful in getting started with Cairngorm.

The Adobe Consulting team will be using Labs as a place where we can continue to offer insight

from the field, and advocate our thoughts on using Cairngorm across the entire Engagement

Platform – be that working with Flex Data Services, or using Cairngorm in a Flash Lite or Apollo

environment. These are all things we have consultants wrestling and working with right now, and

all goodness that we’ll be sharing in the months ahead. Your comments and suggestions are now

welcome.

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Many of the Adobe Consulting team are offsite in Dublin right now, and we have limited access to

our email/blogs for the rest of this week, so forgive us if we don’t respond to your questions

or comments as quickly as we usually do. I expect however, that the rest of the team back home

will step up as appropriate.

There are some changes to Cairngorm 2 from the last beta that we released, that incorporate the

community feedback and field-insight that we have received. There’s a brief discussion in the

release notes for

now, with more information to follow through our blogs, and through further refinement of

the Wiki content. We had committed to ensuring that Cairngorm 2 was available for you in concert

with the Flex 2 release, and that’s the promise we’ve been focussed on keeping for you.

Download it, take it for a spin,

and as always, let us know what tremendous user-experiences you’re delivering upon Cairngorm 2

and Flex 2 !

It’s a hugely exciting time in our community !

Many of you have been asking us publically and privately for latest builds of Cairngorm, and of updates to Cairngormstore, and we’ve been a bit quiet as to the progress we were making….breaking the silence, I’m now pleased to be able to tell you in a public forum that our behind-the-scenes efforts have been instead focussed on getting Cairngorm approved and ready for a forthcoming release on Adobe Labs.

Almost since the day we became Macromedia Consulting (and then Adobe Consulting), we’ve been working with the various internal teams at Adobe, from the Flex product team, through to our consulting teams, legal, finance, and all manner of other stakeholders to ensure that we could find a new permanent home for Cairngorm on Adobe Labs.

Don’t ask me dates, as we can’t reveal anything concrete. Aiming for first half of the year…

What this means for Cairngorm developers everywhere, is that we’ll have a top-level project on Adobe Labs, with a Wiki offering an ever-increasing amount of documentation, samples, links to Cairngorm articles, as well as the very latest builds of Cairngorm 2 itself. Many of you have been building your own sample applications with Cairngorm, creating your own documentation, diagrams and tutorials, and we’ll have an environment where we can now make these more readily accessible to the wider community.

In the coming days, I’ll blog a little more about some of the changes we’ve made to the final release of Cairngorm 2 that you’ll receive shortly. And relax — any migration efforts on your part, if you’ve been with us this far, will be minimal. We have taken on-board the feedback the community has been giving us, along with our own field-level experience from our consulting teams, who have been busily developing Flex 2 applications upon Cairngorm 2, on behalf of a number of Adobe Consulting customers.

I trust this news signifies the continuing and increasing committment that we’re making to Cairngorm, and our continuing ambition within Adobe Consulting to make our internal best-practices instantly and freely available to the current and future RIA development community.

Brian Riggs of the Adobe Kiwi team has posted a fantastic blog entry regarding how the Flex 2 NoteTag application has been built upon the Cairngorm microarchitecture.

Taking a single use-case in the application – selecting one Note from a list of Notes – Brian walks through the sequence and employment of the various design patterns, and shows how the application is delivered with “Cairngorm Thinking”. For many people, the concept of design patterns are an abstract and confusing one, until they are applied in some meaningful context – Brians example is complete with some diagrams that neatly describe how Cairngorm fits in with MVC thinking.