Programming Flex 3

Chapter 21. Building AIR Applications

Up to this point in the book, we’ve looked at how to use Flex to build web applications. However, Flex 3 allows you to build more than web applications. It also allows you to build AIR applications for the desktop. In this chapter, you’ll learn about Adobe AIR and how to use Flex to build AIR applications.

Understanding AIR

Adobe AIR allows developers to use Flash, Flex, and/or HTML/Ajax to create desktop applications. As this is a book about Flex, we’ll only look at using Flex to build AIR applications in this chapter.

AIR is a platform consisting of a runtime environment and developer tools for creating AIR applications. The runtime environment, called the AIR runtime, is a free download from Adobe that users must have installed on their computers to run AIR applications. Conceptually, this runtime environment is very similar to other common runtime environments such as the .NET runtime and the Java runtime. The basic concept is that developers can build applications that run in the runtime environment, allowing for a simple way to create cross-platform applications.

Building an AIR application with Flex is remarkably easy. You can build a basic AIR application using what you learned in the other chapters in this book, together with just a few workflow and technical changes that you’ll read about in the next section. However, you can do more in an AIR application than merely run a standard Flex application in the AIR runtime instead of in a web ...