Hi guys,
Sorry to jump on this thread late, but good to see my
(recent) colleague Brian O'Connor has responsed already .... I know Brian has
been working a great deal with Cairngorm and FES lately, so definitely listen to
what he has to say.
Does Cairngorm work with Flex Enterprise Services ...
absolutely. One of the great things about Flex as it matures
as a technology, is that much of the heavy lifting that Cairngorm did for us,
begins to appear in the technology platform itself.
When Cairngorm was first being used on Flash MX projects,
the ServiceLocator did a whole bunch of heavy-lifting around Flash Remoting,
creating NetConnections, and such like. We advocated the use of
ASTranslator on the server, to achieve the serialisation and deserialisation of
complex value object graphs oer the wire. Flex then gave us the
RemoteObject tag (and other RPC tags) and suddenly that behavior was all
encapsulated for us within a single tag.....so suddenly, our ServiceLocator got
a LOT simpler, and could be implemented with MXML instead of
ActionScript.
Data binding would be another great example .... the more
we built projects and learned how to leverage data-binding, the more we
recognised the value of a ModelLocator approach that embraced the capabilities
of the Flex platform, over ViewLocator and ViewHelpers where we tried to
implement that kind of behavior by ourselves. Again, the complexity moved
into the platform (yet lovingly hidden from the developer's view) and out of the
Cairngorm framework.
If you're leveraging RPC services, the Cairngorm approach
is still valid; and it's my expectation and experience so far that an enterprise
project will leverage both a mix of RPC and Data Services according to the
infrastructure that is being integrated with, and according to the particular
development requirements. So I always expect you'll continue to use
Cairngorm with RPC services - Enterprise Data Services is not going to be the
death-knell of the Service Oriented Architecture, but rather will give us new
opportunities to build certain types of applications - and more powerful
applications than before - more easily.
Before I answer the question being asked, it's also worth
reiterating that we consider Cairngorm to be an exemplification of practices
that we derive *in the field*. As iteration::two, that experience was
drawn from iteration::two engagements, now we have the luxury of drawing that
field experience across many many more engagements. I'm loathe that we
advocate best-practices that are "academic deductions" rather than drawn down
from actual experience of using the technology in practice. I'm often
heard quoting that "the difference between theory and practice, is that in
theory ,there is no difference between theory and practice".
So do we have ideas as to how Cairngorm and FES can work
together - for sure we do !!! Are we ready to advocate them with
Cairngorm ... we will be soon, but let us collect our thoughts a little more
first. But I'd love to draw down on the experience and thoughts of our
customers and partners who are also working with Flex 2, with FES and with
Cairngorm 2.0.
To my mind (consider this hints to get started) there is no
need for the business delegate class when we are working with FES. If we
have data services, they're services we want to declare. Where might we do
that ? :) I've got my ideas...
DataCollections offer us "managed collections" of objects;
ultimately we'll want to still bind these objects to our user-experience, so for
me, Collections and the ModelLocator are now a natural fit for each other.
But now the model - or certain kinds of model - can now look after their own
integration and synchronisation with the server; and now the server can push
data all the way up to the model. That's the base-case, but I think there
are also use-cases where the Command tier needs to get involved too, and that's
where we still have to do a little thinking before advocating what we think
"best-practice" might be.
We'll certainly have leadership to offer from our
experience .... but let's draw down on your experiences as
well.
I'm hugely excited by Data Services. I think once
again, the Flex technology platform is maturing to alleviate even more of the
heavy lifting that we have to do when building data-rich Rich Internet
Applications. If this simplifies our technical architectures, then our
applications will be all the better for it.
"Simplicity isn't when there is nothing left to add, but
when there is nothing left to take away"
I look forward to some of your thoughts, before sharing
some more of ours,
Best,
Steven
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