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What is the meaning of Adobe AIR?

I'm a little confused. I continue to see articles on how Adobe AIR allows you to download applications that run on the desktop. Don't we have this? How is this different from any WinForms or WPF application? Just the fact that you can download it from the Internet? Did I miss something?

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Adobe took the concept of launching a web browser and a web server and created a desktop application infrastructure. This means that you can create a “website” that runs without a server.

There are some nice things with this approach. The main thing is that it allows you to do things locally, which a website cannot do, for example, read and write files, or create custom windows. And since the “browser” in which it runs is a known quantity, you can take advantage of WebKit extensions. Or you can just create it in Flash. Or combine these two as you need.

Adobe also used cross-platform quality: both key parts of AIR (Flash and WebKit) are already available on Windows, MacOS and Linux, so there wasn’t much to do the whole AIR cross-platform. This gives a really neat effect: the same .air file should install on any AIR install. And the same will work.

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Of course, you can do something in WPF - if you are a .NET programmer. You can also do something in Java if you are a Java programmer. If you are a Flash / HTML / JS / web programmer, you can use AIR. Other than that, you will not miss anything.

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You can create desktop applications with languages ​​more commonly associated with web development. In other words, you can create desktop applications using HTML / CSS and JavaScript, or Adobe Flash technology (more commonly used). It makes him different. It also has some really good built-in features, such as automatic updates and a built-in SQLite database for storage, and the installation will take care of you.

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I would say adobe air is Adobe's answer that needs to be clicked after deployment. In addition, it allows flash developers to expand their web applications there as desktop applications such as twhril for twitter. Microsoft's answer will be Silverlight 3, which should be available next month.

It does not seem to me that there are many differences from the fact that the web developer runs his applications on the desktop and the desktop developer, trying to configure the application there for the Internet. In general, I'm talking about this just another taste of the thin client.

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Adobe Air competes in the space that is now known as Rich Internet Applications (RIA). The concept here is to create web applications that have user interface elements that are more powerful than what is available in the browser. The competitors in the RIA space are:

  • Adobe Air / Flash
  • Microsoft silverlight
  • Javafx
  • HTML / CSS / Javascript (as seen from Google web applications)

The point is to deliver desktop applications that combine the features of web applications, such as:

  • one-time deployment / always up-to-date code
  • rich set of programmer / API libraries compared to what is available in the DOM
  • the ability to deliver media content beyond what is available in HTML
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Now AIR can work on portable phones (including iPhone), tablets and on the desktop.

The main advantage of AIR over any other system that does the same is a large user base, active and funded - product development and periodic updates for all the systems on which it works.

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In addition to the items above, AIR applications can run on MacOSX, Windows, and Linux. A single deployment deploys not only the application, but if necessary, the runtime and runtime is a small load.

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