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

1.2. The Tools

Adobe has made it possible to create and distribute AIR applications with absolutely no cost at all. It again (as it did with Flex 2) offers a free SDK that can be used to package AIR applications using a command window with the ADT library. The SDK also allows the compilation of the application to a temporary file for testing purposes. The temporary file is created using the ADL library and runs the application without the need of installing it to the operating system.

Flex Builder has also been updated to version 3 and now includes the AIR tools. Flex Builder 3 makes it easy to create, test, debug, and package AIR applications, and although this is not a free tool, in my experience it is worth every penny. This book focuses on building applications with the use of Flex Builder 3.

Adobe has also released extensions for both Dreamweaver CS3 and Flash CS3 to integrate the creation and testing of AIR applications within these tools. These tools are covered in Chapters 4 and 5.

1.2.1. The AIR SDK

The AIR SDK is a free library offered by Adobe, which allows you to test an AIR application using the adl command and also compile the application to a distributable AIR package using the adt command. There is no GUI (graphical user interface) offered, although it is not very difficult to set up an ant task to call these commands from an editing tool like Eclipse.

1.2.1.1. ADL

The adl command is part of the free AIR SDK and allows for the testing of AIR applications without ...