Professional Adobe® Flex® 3

Chapter 69. Desktop Deployment with AIR

With the long hours of hard work coding the application behind you, it's time to package it up as an AIR file and deliver it to end users. Before distributing an application, though, it'll need to be code signed with a certificate issued by a security authority, like VeriSign or Thawte. After acquiring a certificate, the AIR package will be code signed, allowing customers to verify who made and packaged the application. This is important because Adobe AIR applications execute with the same user privileges as native applications, allowing local filesystem access, including full file manipulation support, network connectivity, bitmap rendering, local data access, and so forth.

After code signing the AIR package, it can then be distributed to end users via a few different methods:

• By providing a link to download the AIR file package via a link on the Internet.

• By creating a Web-based installation with Adobe's AIR badge with one-click install, which will verify that the AIR runtime is installed on the user's machine and install your application, all from within a web page.

• By redistributing Adobe AIR runtime and the AIR application with a silent installation. This is useful for enterprise distribution where end users shouldn't be prompted with end-user license agreements (EULAs) and installation wizards.

Let's get started by signing an AIR Application code signing.

Code Signing and Certificates

Code signing an AIR application builds end-user confidence ...