I recently read Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine, and was very pleased with how the book was crafted and authored. There were several points in the book where the language deviated from a calm and cool demeanor, which serves its message well, and the author used terms that were unneccesarily crude or clumsy.

However, if you have any interest in understanding the basics of how the political class has slowly, but steadily, poisoned the Republic that our Founding Fathers establish for us, then you will find this book eye-opening to say the least.

You will see how the deck is stacked against us, and how the two major political parties have, in every sense of the phrase, pulled the wool over our eyes to keep us blind to the insidious changes and corruptions to the basics ideals of liberty, freedom, and private property over the years.

Also, if you identify yourself as a Progressive, then this book is a must read as you might change your mind as to how you label yourself.

If you are frustrated with how this country has plummeted economically and lost many of its features as a Republic of free people, then this book will give you some great insight into how you CAN make change and throw off the indoctrination that the major political parties have submitted you to.

** Addendum: The original Common Sense by Thomas Paine is included at the end of this book, so you are getting two for the price of one.

I just realized how long it has been since I’ve made a blog posting, and so I decided to talk a little a little more about what I’ve been doing with Flex and Cairngorm.

A colleague of mine has recently put in a lot of work in developing an internal application architecture that extends the Cairngorm architecture, while remaining true to the basic patterns. We adopted several of my ideas from the posts about abstract classes, but with some tweaks to make them more Cairngorm-standard, rather than changing the way the architecture works.

If I started a project from scratch, I would still choose to use my classes as the base, but since we work in a company with an existing investment in Cairngorm, this extended architecture had to support the old applications.

Here’s some of the things that are in our Cairngorm Extended Architecture.

• Modular development. This was THE main goal of the project and we can now easily develop modular apps with Cairngorm.
• Event callbacks. Each Cairngorm event can now have a Responder parameter that can make the views receive feedback on the success/failure of commands.
• Chain/Parallel commands. We can map a single Cairngorm event to multiple commands and have the execute in parallel or chained (asynchronous).
• Global data registry. This feature allows modules to access data contained in another module’s data model.
• Global event bus. An application-scoped event bus that allows modules to communicate with each other.
• Sophisticated module loading configuration options.
• Extended basic Cairngorm service locator pattern to support Flex Messaging and ColdFusion Messaging (using ColdFusion Event Gateways).

We’ve got it up and running on a few smaller applications, but we’re already planning on getting our two main business applications using it within a year.

Exciting times!