Adobe AIR Wiki

	Adobe AIR wiki
Category Development Other

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AIR

Developed by	Adobe Systems
Initial release	1.0 / February 25, 2008
Latest release	1.5.1.8210 / February 24, 2009
Operating system	Linux, Mac OS X, Windows
Platform	Cross-platform
Available in	English
Development status	Active
Type	Runtime environment
License	Adobe AIR EULA
Website	Adobe: AIR

Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is a cross-platform runtime environment for building rich Internet applications using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML, or Ajax, that can be deployed as a desktop application. Adobe made a public preview release of AIR (then called Apollo) along with a software development kit (SDK) and extension for developing Apollo applications with the Flex framework, on March 19, 2007. On June 10, 2007, Apollo was renamed to AIR and a public beta release of the runtime was launched. Public beta 2 of AIR SDK was released on October 1, 2007. Public beta 3, was released on December 12, 2007, and version 1.0 was released on February 25, 2008.^[1]^[2] A stable Linux version was released on December 18, 2008.^[3]^[4] As of February 2009, there have been over 100 million installations of Adobe AIR around the globe.^[5]

1 Overview
2 See also
3 References

[edit] Overview

AIR is intended to be a versatile runtime environment, as it allows existing Flash, Actionscript or HTML and JavaScript code to be used to construct a more traditional desktop-like program. Adobe positions it as a browser-less runtime for rich Internet applications that can be deployed onto the desktop, rather than a fully-fledged application framework. The differences between each deployment paradigm provides both advantages and disadvantages. For example, a rich internet application deployed in a browser does not require installation, while one deployed with AIR requires the application be packaged, digitally signed, and installed to the user's local file system. However, this provides access to local storage and file systems, while browser-deployed applications are more limited in where and how data are accessed and stored.^[6] In most cases, rich internet applications store users' data on their own servers, but the ability to consume and work with data on a user's local file system allows for greater flexibility. Adobe AIR 1.1 was released on June 16, 2008, and provides support for building internationalized applications. Runtime installation dialogs were localized to Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish. In addition, version 1.1 includes support for Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise.^[7]

[edit] Applications

AIR applications can operate offline, and then activate further functionality or upload data when an active Internet connection becomes available. One example is eBay Desktop, which allows sellers to complete a listing offline and then upload it to eBay when they are connected to the Internet.^[8] Other companies using AIR include AOL, NASDAQ, The New York Times and Yahoo!.^[9] Over 470 applications are available on the Adobe AIR marketplace.^[10]

[edit] Development environment

Adobe provides three ways of developing AIR applications:

HTML/Ajax, either via Adobe's own Dreamweaver CS4, another HTML editor or a normal text editor in conjunction with the AIR SDK.^[11]
Flex Builder 3
Flash CS4

Dreamweaver CS4 requires an additional extension to compile AIR applications,^[12] as does Flash CS3 in the form of an update.^[13] The cross-platform nature of the runtime means any HTML editor, coupled with the AIR SDK, can create AIR applications. AIR itself uses the WebKit HTML rendering engine, along with Flash and PDF technologies.^[8]

[edit] JavaScript toolkits

To run in the AIR environment JavaScript toolkits need changes—because of the security model.Category:Wikipedia articles needing clarification from February 2009^{[clarification needed]} A number of toolkits have been modified in this way, most notably dojo.