Cairngorm Wiki

The History of Cairngorm

The team at Adobe Consulting who built Cairngorm have been the earliest advocates of design pattern frameworks for RIA development. The ideas in the Cairngorm framework were first advocated in the book Reality J2EE - Architecting for Flash MX, released by Macromedia Press in 2002. As the technologies for RIA matured to ActionScript 2.0 and Flash Remoting with Flash MX 2004, the ideas behind Cairngorm were revisited in ActionScipt 2.0 Design Patterns for rich Internet applications in the ActionScript 2.0 Dictionary from Macromedia Press. The current incarnation of Cairngorm will be most familiar to those who have followed the best-practices theory advocated by Steven Webster and Alistair McLeod (previously at iteration::two, now at Adobe Consulting) in the acclaimed Developing Rich Clients with Macromedia Flex, the first book on best-practices for Enterprise RIA development with Adobe Flex.

The Cairngorm architecture has been successfully applied in generations of Enterprise RIA development by Adobe Consulting. Additionally, teams of enterprise developers around the world have applied the ideas to their own RIA architectures. The establishment of the Cairngorm architecture as a de-facto framework for Enterprise RIA development has led to the decision to ensure that future development of the Cairngorm platform captures the combined knowledge capital of the international development community, through an open-source development model.

Although the open-source decision had been hinted at to the development community, the Cairngorm microarchitecture was formally announced as an open-source project at the Macromedia MAX2004 conference in New Orleans in November 2004.

The first open-source release of the Cairngorm framework was labelled the 0.95 version for Flex 1.5, with an updated 0.99 version (with new features) released soon thereafter.

The most version of Cairngorm 2 is for Flex 2/3 and can be found on the Downloads Page .