 |
Adobe 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. A Linux alpha version was released on March 31, 2008.
Adobe 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. Adobepositions 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. 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 languages. 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. |
