Cairngorm for a Flash CS4 guy

[illustratedlife]

Hey guys,

I've recently been recruited to a new project. I'm replacing a Flex dev who started to use Cairngorm, but got booted from the team. The other members of the team are from more traditional web-dev backgrounds and haven't worked with the Flash player before. (One guy is trying to pickup Flex/Cairngorm to keep the project moving forward). So far as I can tell, the project is still early-enough where we could start over in Flash without losing too much work.

I've written about my background in more detail below. In short, I'm well-versed in object-oriented AS3 targeting Flash CS4. I haven't worked with Flex before, and as the Flash guy on the team, I need to provide leadership to decide whether or not we keep Flex/Cairngorm, or move completely to Flash. We're building a media-management app that consumes a RESTful web service and has a very thoroughly-designed UI, currently in Illustrator.

I'd love to hear any recommendations as to how best structure this. It looks like I'll be building the UI and the guy who's been deciphering what we have so far will be handling the web service calls.

My background:
I'm a one-man web app shop. I do some work with Python/Django, but spend most of my time creating object-oriented projects in Flash CS4. I generally work alone, doing both design and development. I've got a vague familiarity with Flex, but I've never really explored MXML or the mx package. I'm not an engineer by training - I'm a creative and a businessman with an intuition for programming. I have a general understanding of design patterns like MVC (mostly from the couple of apps I've built in Django), but my Flash work is usually an event-driven collection of a few dozen classes. As far as code architecture, I'm good about subclassing, using events, and marking the inner-workings of my classes private/protected. I don't usually worry about design patterns beyond that.

Please advise. Thanks.

[fx.barrett]

In short: go on with Flex. Flash is not a development environment, it's good for making animations and simple stuff but it would be way time consuming to build a real application in Flash. Cairngorm will definitely help you in the long run, stick with it.

[jAQUAN]

this project wouldn't be geared towards running ads in and around video would it? Just sounds like a situation I'm privy to.

[illustratedlife]

Thanks - I'll keep that in mind.

Do you have any good resources for picking up Flex/Cairngorm if you are already skilled at Flash/AS3?

I've stuck with Flash rather than Flex because I like being able to draw my UI in Library symbols, even though 85% of the work I do is class-based (and most of my stuff would be compilable through mxmlc if I imported Tween from the fl package). Is there a straight-forward way to use Flash's Library when targeting Flex?