subject: Rich Internet Application development with Adobe AIR [print this page] Rich Internet Application development with Adobe AIR
Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) developed by Adobe. It is not an another programming language but it is a cross platform runtime environment, that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills in Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML, javascript and Ajax to build and deploy RIA (Rich Internet Applications) to the desktop. There is no need for developers to develop any new skills; they use their existing development skills. RIA combines the best features of a desktop application with broad reach and low cost of deployment of web application which means using Adobe AIR, developers can create applications that combine benefits of web applications with the strength of desktop applications.
The Adobe AIR runtime may be a relatively new platform, but it actually embeds three highly mature and stable cross-platform technologies such as Adobe Flash player, Webkit and SQLite to power AIR applications. Webkit strongly supports to W3C standards, such as DOM (Document Object Model), HTML, XHTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
Advantages of Adobe AIR are enormous. Some of them include:
Automatically update application when ever user goes online.
It allows loading and saving of application on the user computer.
It facilitates a notification system, which allows communications between AIR applications that are running on the same computer.
It has embedded SQL databases to store information locally.
As it supports to Flash player indicates its very rich support to multimedia and vector animation as well as audio.
Now a days Adobe AIR is gaining popularity because it helps Adobe AIR developers to develop highly interactive applications.
