after6ix

Mike Downey talks AIR in Singapore

Mike Downey swinged by Singapore for the iX2007 Academic Forum and the nice folks at Adobe Singapore arranged for him to share a informal session of Adobe Integrated Runtime love with us folks.

Mike ran through quite an extensive session and covered most of the features on the AIR.

One of the key selling points being that AIR is an excellent platform to re-purpose web applications. Since the AIR basically runs on the Flash Platform, when converting the web applications onto desktop applications, it is a lot faster and more efficient as the programming language and code base is essentially still ActionScript 3. This spares developers the pain to maintaining different codes for the different operating systems. One code to rule them all!

The runtime provides a consistent cross-operating system platform, minimizing duplicated effort in testing on various operating systems. An excellent example demonstrated was the Scrapblog whereby he demonstrated a Scrapblog AIR application. This desktop counterpart of Scrapblog shares the same functionalities (if not more) and allow users to actually do most of the work offline. Once the user is done and happy with the various edits, the application then uploads the final creation to the Scrapblog servers. Definitely a smarter way of doing things rather than having to take up the bandwidth and sending huge images back and forth between the servers and the user’s machine.

He also mentioned that Adobe actually worked very closely with Apple and Adobe was actually involved in a part of the recent Apple Safari 3 browser. Nothing surprising considering the fact that the AIR HTMLControl class is built on WebKit, an open source web browser engine.

All functionalities of webkit engine are now natively integrated inside AIR. The possibilities can be quite incredibile, things like applying blurring on HTML divs or even dynamically altering visual properties of HTML content (for example, dropping shadows, adding reflections etc.) can actually be easiliy achieved with AIR.

Similarly, the AIR also provides a single unified runtime for the AJAX camp. AJAX developers will now have a consistent platform to work on rather than struggling with the idiosyncracies from making things work similarly on various web browsers. Time to focus the work on the actual development than testing on the numerous browsers available!

AIR includes the capabilities of creating and working with local SQL databases and comes with an integrated SQLite engine. Google Gears use SQLite engine too but as pointed out, the key difference being AIR provides both asynchronous and synchronous calls and Google Gears only have synchronous calls. On this note, as covered by David Berlind on ZDNet.com, apparently Adobe will be working with Google on aligning efforts with the synchronous and asynchronous calls that must be made to the SQLite database in order to enable the Google Gears offline capability.

Future releases of the runtime will have auto-update features. One interesting bit is that the installation is actually incremental, all versions of the runtime will be kept on the user’s machine. The runtime will be able to use the appropriate version to run the AIR applications. This ensures that whenever Adobe releases an update, the applications based on the older runtime versions will still be able to run. Definitely a huge feature and a major time-saver.

It was definitely a very fruitful and through session, hearing Mike Downey running through the various features that AIR brings about and demonstrating the various AIR applications currently available. It is one thing to read about it online but to actually see and hear it… Wow. Very exciting times indeed for developers. Kudos to Adobe Singapore and Mike!