Beginning Adobe® AIR™: Building Applications for the Adobe Integrated Runtime

Foreword

By Edward Mansouri

The life cycle of Internet-based applications is taking an exciting turn toward the desktop.

The earliest Internet-based applications used on a large scale by the general public were the ASCII text-based e-mail and web clients of the 1980s, such as the University of Washington's Pine and the University of Minnesota's Gopher.

With the introduction of the first graphical browser, NCSA Mosaic in September 1993, an era of browser-based, graphics-intensive Internet content and applications began and would last more than 13 years.

Over time, remarkable advancements have been made in the browser itself to serve increasingly rich content including audio and video as well as the ability to provide Web developers with client-side runtimes with languages such as JavaScript and Microsoft's Active X to further customize the way users interact with Web content. In addition, the presentation capabilities made available to designers continue to accelerate with languages such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Also, another important technology that has evolved as consistently and reliably as the browser itself is the Shockwave Flash (SWF) file format from Macromedia (acquired by Adobe in 2005).

Flash first appeared on the scene in 1996, largely as a tool in the graphic designer's repertoire for embedding animated and engaging content into a web site.

A few years later, Flash would begin its turn toward appealing not just to designers but also to developers with the advent ...