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

Introduction

AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) was first introduced by Adobe in early 2008 with the goal of offering a cross-platform runtime for the development of desktop applications. Although there are some platform-specific features, the AIR APIs make "write once, deploy anywhere" possible for the development of desktop applications.

What makes AIR unique is that the languages used to produce AIR applications are not new languages. They are languages that have been used in Web development for many years. These languages include HTML with JavaScript (AJAX), MXML (Flex), and ActionScript. By making it very easy for existing AJAX and Flex/Flash developers to write desktop applications, the time to learn it is extremely brief for those with experience in these languages. This should also help the adoption rate of the AIR development platform.

This book follows a step-by-step process, walking you through the features of the AIR development platform. It is designed to get you familiarized quickly with many of the features of AIR. I highly recommend that you continue your learning process by understanding and using the ActionScript and MXML documentation that is provided by Adobe.

Whom This Book Is For

Although there are some simple examples of creating applications using HTML within Dreamweaver CS3 and Flash-based AIR applications using Flash CS3, the primary language in this book will be MXML and ActionScript, and the primary development tool will be Flex Builder 3. If you have ...