As an application’s complexity increases, the ease of maintenance decreases. Heck, sometimes it gets harder to even extend an application with new functionality. I’ve been working on a Flex project in my free time for the last six months or so. It’s been getting pretty unwieldy lately, and I’ve had to juggle a few too many ugly details just to modify certain interactions. After a particularly frustrating night, I decided that I should finally take a break from my coding and check out Cairngorm.

For my first flying leap into this framework, I started by developing a simple search application based on the Yahoo! API Libraries for ActionScript 3. It displays web or image results in a list and allows you to move back or forward between pages. Nothing too complicated. I wanted to start with something a bit more complex than this Hello World example (written by Laura Arguello at ASFusion), but I needed to keep it simple enough that most of my focus would be on learning Cairngorm rather than designing the interface.

I had some trouble finding simple examples of Cairngorm out in the wild, and I found it a bit frustrating. If you’re new to Cairngorm, and you want to learn more, please right-click on the app to view the source code. I encourage you to focus on the MVC structure of the classes. However, please note that I didn’t spend a lot of time cleaning up the code for the user interface. In particular, there’s a messy item renderer on the search results list that I should have made into a proper class, and I’m sure I decided to skip a few other best practices. It should be useful enough, though.