Not sure if anyone knew that I play WoW, I used to play pretty heavily.  I had a high end guild that I helped run for awhile before the new x-pak and realized I was simply playing way to much, so I toned it down a bit.  Now I just do pvp stuff and level alts. 

Anyway, I was cleaning out some of my old videos and screenshots and I ran across a video I made of me and two other guys 3 manning a SV boss.

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For all you appelites out there (yes I am a convert myself), Check this video out.  Pretty creative.

I was reading through some blogs this morning, some how I managed to read a July 2007 post on Sean Corfield's site nearly a year later... which sent me to Brian Rinald's blog and Matt Woodwards Blog about Design patterns in CF  (both are good reads, why I didnt see them before... who knows).  Than I started reading about some of Brian's post on his cf.objective() reviews, which led me to this post in particular "Flex: No Framworks Required". Anyway, most of what I do is in Flex these days with little CF writing since I use a kick@__ generator (cough... Illidium) for most of the backend logic for most of the backend logic, ColdSpring & I am looking into leveraging Transfer.

Now I have read one book so far on Design patterns, "Advanced Design Patterns for ActionScript" by Joey Lott & Danny Patterson.  This book discusses MVC, Command, Singleton, Proxy, Memento, Factory, Template and many others.  Brian's post mentions some other patterns one of which I am not familiar with:

• Observer (I use this to help Cairngorm notify my view)
• Registry
• Responder (I use this)

In Sean's comments some folks talk about a ProtoType pattern that I am not familiar with yet , he also mentions a book by "The Gang of Four" on design patterns another book that I may be adding to my collection soon. 

So with all the hype, and I say hype not to mock patterns (I do indeed believe in their use), but in our community patterns are being talked about alot... therefore at the moment its the "hype".  So with all the hype in patterns, is there a.....

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I Googled and checked out flex.org for a component that has already been built that mimics the functionality provided in the two links below.  I have seen it on quite a few sites today and I like how it flows.  I think this would be great as a flex component.  Before I start coding something I wanted to make sure it doesnt already exist.  No sense in re-inventing the wheel.

Has anyone seen this in Flex and if so does anyone know if someone has coded this as a custom reusable component yet?  I didnt see anything on Ely Greenfields site either.  The effect basically creates a horizontal scrolling effect with a smooth transition.  The controls in both examples have arrows and in the panic example the tabs also control the animation.  Check it out and let me know if you know of a similiar component that provides the capability already so I dont waste any energy on this. :)

http://www.panic.com/coda/ (Check out the tabs/arrow animation and the rewind effect when you get to last tab)
http://www.juliendassonval.fr/ (same as above under projects)

PS: I think the panic site just crashed... dont quote me on that though, my internet has been shady the last two days.

This example uses the Contact Manager, a (very) simple flex application, that I talked about in Part 1 "Contact Manager Part 1 - Remoting Example".   I took that application and modified it to use the Cairngorm framework - "Microarchitecture is a lightweight yet prescriptive framework for rich Internet application (RIA) development". 

Cairngorm was developed by the folks at Iteration two (now part of Adobe Consulting) and is pretty easy to use.  There are some drawbacks (some of which have been solved by UniversalMinds Cairngorm Extensions)  and I recommend anyone thinking of using Cairngorm to read a post by Steven Webster (Now on Adobe Feeds), also read this (its out of date somewhat, but the concept is still in tact), furthermore check out the Roundtable discussion on Coldfusion weekly, which provides some other insights to Cairngorm.  Normally you wouldnt use Cairngorm for something so simple as the Contact Manager, but for a large application Cairngorm can be very beneficial and worth the extra code.

Ok, so in Cairngorm you basically have the following design patterns in use (forgive me if I miss one, going on memory):

• MVC (model view and controller)
• Singleton Pattern
• Command Pattern
• Delegate Pattern (something they cooked up for Cairngorm)

Cairngorm is made up of these main sections (a good overview can be found here):

• ModelLocator
• Controller
• The applications views (mxml components)
• CairngormEventDispatcher, CairngormEvent
• Events
• Command
• Delegate
• ServiceLocator

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