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Take in some fresh AIR

POSTED 17th July 09, by Mike Griffiths.

Adobe AIR is a new technology released by the software vendor Adobe. The idea is a simple one: to allow web developers to create desktop applications without having to learn a new programming language.

Anyone who has ever programmed will know that there is a big difference between creating web applications (like a blog) and offline desktop applications (like a word processor). For starters they are both (potentially) written in different programming languages, not to mention there's massive differences in the way that the programs themselves need to be written - things like memory leaks and file systems access need to be taken into consideration. It is also notoriously difficult to design layouts for windowed applications in a desktop environment, packages like Swing have made the job easier but still the job is still quite difficult.

Adobe AIR comes with a HTML renderer, which means that anyone who knows how to write a well-formatted and standard-compliant web page can write an Adobe AIR application. JavaScript is also available to be used which opens the doors to powerful drag-and-drop capabilities and allows to manipulation of elements on the window itself.

With AIR developers will have access to a set of tools that will allow them to create nearly any kind of small-scale application. There is support for the native file system, clipboard support (copy & paste) and basic networking support.

Although there is no support currently for other languages such as PHP to be integrated in, AIR does make it possible to communicate with a web server, much like Adobe Flash can. This means that any dynamic content that needs to be produced can be done so on an external web site, not only making it an easier application to create but it also minimises the size of the application and maximises compatibility with systems - it will, however, require users to have an Internet connection.

Unlike a lot of Adobe technologies that can only be produced in Adobes high-priced commercial development tools, the AIR IDE is built on Eclipse, a free open-source IDE used for creating Java (with subsidiaries for PHP) applications.

In conclusion, Adobe AIR is a solid fondation for building some useful applications. It is not designed for anything large-scale, but that's fine as this kind of tool would never be considered for anything of any real size or mission-critical purpose. There are already useful programs popping up that are built in Adobe AIR such as TweetDeck, an all-in-one tool for managing multiple Twitter accounts - I personally expect to see a lot more similar applications sooner rather than later.

TAGS: ADOBE, AIR