There has been no shortage of discussion about Cairngorm over the last twelve months. In particular there has been a lot of discussion comparing Cairngorm with the other Flex frameworks that have been, and continue to emerge. But there has been surprisingly few announcements from the Cairngorm team. That all changed yesterday with a lengthy posting by both Alistair Mcleod and Steven Webster.

Just a quick post to share a couple of useful and interesting recent posts relating to Flex Frameworks. First up Andrew Powell has written a big picture overview comparing Cairngorn, Mate and Swiz. He notes : "I think that Cairngorm will make more sense to developers coming from the Java world.

A current project at work is integrating Drupal & Flex together. There are a number of benefits to using these systems together. For me the main one is that you can offer the usability richness that Flex allows and the accessibility that standards based CMS's like Drupal offer without a lot of extra work. The Drupal modules that make this possible are Services and AMFPHP.

Adobe has just released a beta version of Gumbo, the next version of Flex.

The Melbourne based OzFlex User Group will be holding their next meeting on Monday 12th May at the Loop Bar. The night will feature a Adobe AIR presentation and they will be giving away a full copy of Flex Builder 3 Professional. Doors open at 6.30 for a 7 PM start. You can find out more and register at OzFlex.

Yesterday I started work on my first real AIR widget.  I've had a play around with it in the past and enjoyed what I've seen.   But it's not until you have a real project that you start  to really appreciate a new technology.  The widget  I'm building is going to need multiple windows so I spent a fair bit of time getting used to the AIR Window mechanism.