What Is Adobe AIR? Redux
Back in January I wrote a series of articles about Adobe AIR, which at the time was still in Beta. Now that Adobe AIR has been officially released as version 1.0 I though I’d have another go a explaining what AIR actually is by translating Adobe’s definition into plain English.
You can read the original article here and the series is here.
Adobe’s official blurb gives this as the definition:
Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that enables web developers to use their existing web development skills, code and tools to build and deploy rich web applications and content to the desktop.
Adobe AIR has a rich set of features, with support for building applications using HTML, JavaScript, Flex and Flash.
So if that leaves you thinking, “Huh?? ” then let’s break it down to see what it all means.
“Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime ” = You can make things using AIR that will run on Windows or Mac OS X (Linux coming soon). People that want to use things you created using AIR have to install AIR on their computer first. If they don’t already have AIR on their computer it downloads in the background when they install an AIR programme.
“that enables web developers to use their existing web development skills ” = If you can build a web site, you pretty much know how to make things in AIR.
“code and tools to build and deploy rich web applications and content to the desktop.” = If you build your web sites using HTML, Flash, JavaScript that is…
“Adobe AIR has a rich set of features” = You can do a lot with AIR
“with support for building applications using HTML, JavaScript, Flex and Flash.” = And you can do it all in HTML, JavaScript, Flash, Flex (a framework for using Flash). You can also incorporate PDFs and JavaScript libraries such as JQuery.
Curl, an alternative to AIR, has been offering many of same features (i.e. Desktop RIA across Linux, Windows, and soon Mac) for years. Curl was developed at MIT and launched in the US last year.
Richard Monson-Haefel
March 1, 2008
I’m curious, why do you say “launched in the US last year”?
I’m certainly not saying that AIR is the only (or the first) kid on the block. And it’s certainly not going to be the last entrant into the RIA on the desktop domain, but I do think it has the best chance of being the most widely adopted. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t space for others to succeed.
At the moment I can build and deploy an AIR app for free and that appeals to most developers. It also means we’ll probably see an expansion of the widget type apps. Large scale enterprises may well look at alternatives to AIR and different licensing models, but for the average web design workshop, they’ll go with AIR.
blueclock
March 1, 2008