Cairngorm Generators
I looked into Cairngorm a while ago (version 0.95 I believe, pre-ModelLocator area) and didn’t like the fact that you couldn’t use Flex bindings at that time. I recently gave it a second look I liked what I saw. Using Cairngorm is at first very verbose but it provides you with a clear way of organizing your code, which is very beneficial on larger projects. Cairngorm is well documented and there are several nice examples available. Also checkout http://www.cairngormdocs.org/. So yesterday introduced Cairgorm on two Flex projects I am working on.
The first project is a larger Flex 1.5 project (65 actionscript classes, 75 Data transfer object, >100 Mxml views) that I need to migrate to Flex 2.0. I though “great time to start with Cairngorm”. So the first step was to look at all the user gestures for all the screens and create a list of events, map these events to commands, create 3 delegates and services to handle all the remote calls. On paper that was pretty fast to do, but I didn’t want to create all the Cairngorm supporting class by hand. Handily I found the following generator that is a PHP application:
It targets currently only Cairngorm 2.0 and not the newer Cairngorm 2.1. So after generate the supporting classes I had to manually do some changes. But thanks for this tool.
The second project is a smaller Flex application backed by a Ruby on Rails server. And I found the following Ruby on Rails Cairngorm generators at http://code.google.com/p/cairngorm-rails-generator/
Simply copy the generators to your “/vendor/generators” folder, the generators folder will then contain the following generators:
cairngorm
command
delegate
event
vo
worbservice
Note there are several places in Rails you can set generators, but that did the trick for me. The I created a “src” folder in my Rails root folder and issues the following commands:
Then you can use these different generator commands to build the structure you require, the events, commands, delegates and more.
./script/generate cairngorm org/onrails/myspyder
./script/generate delegate org/onrails/myspyder server
./script/generate command org/onrails/myspyder show_page_watch server
./script/generate event org/onrails/myspyder show_page_watch
I issued the generate script for each of the commands that application needs to support. The main controller now looks as follows (still very early in the development phase)
package org.onrails.myspyder.control
{
import com.adobe.cairngorm.control.FrontController;
import com.adobe.cairngorm.control.CairngormEventDispatcher;
import org.onrails.myspyder.control.;
import org.onrails.myspyder.command.;
public class MySpyderController extends FrontController
{
public function MySpyderController()
{
initialiseCommands();
}
public function initialiseCommands() : void
{
// Application Tabs
addCommand( ShowAccountEvent.EVENT_SHOW_ACCOUNT, ShowAccountCommand );
addCommand( ShowPagesEvent.EVENT_SHOW_PAGES, ShowPagesCommand );
addCommand( ShowSettingsEvent.EVENT_SHOW_SETTINGS, ShowSettingsCommand );
// Page List
addCommand( ReloadPagesEvent.EVENT_RELOAD_PAGES, ReloadPagesCommand );
addCommand( AddPageEvent.EVENT_ADD_PAGE, AddPageCommand );
addCommand( ReloadPageEvent.EVENT_RELOAD_PAGE, ReloadPageCommand );
addCommand( RemovePageEvent.EVENT_REMOVE_PAGE, RemovePageCommand );
addCommand( SavePageEvent.EVENT_SAVE_PAGE, SavePageCommand );
// Page Details
addCommand( ShowPageWatchEvent.EVENT_SHOW_PAGE_WATCH, ShowPageWatchCommand );
addCommand( ShowPageWatchResultEvent.EVENT_SHOW_PAGE_WATCH_RESULT, ShowPageWatchResultCommand );
// Html Section
addCommand( ShowOriginalPageEvent.EVENT_SHOW_ORIGINAL_PAGE, ShowOriginalPageCommand );
addCommand( ShowPageSectionEvent.EVENT_SHOW_PAGE_SECTION, ShowPageSectionCommand );
addCommand( SelectPageSectionEvent.EVENT_SELECT_PAGE_SECTION, SelectPageSectionCommand );
}
}
}
Let me know your experience with Flex and Cairngorm.
Daniel Wanja
HTML5, iOS and Ruby On Rails Nouvelles Solutions, Inc.
d@n-so.com
