Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook
by Rich Tretola, David Tucker, Marco Casario, Koen DeWeggheleire, Koen De Weggheleire
Chapter 5. HTML Content
Adobe AIR allows a strong integration with HTML content and JavaScript. Thanks to the WebKit open source browser engine embedded in the Adobe runtime, AIR offers a complete and robust HTML renderer and JavaScript interpreter to re-create a browser-like experience. Through the WebKit framework (http://webkit.org/), developers can create an AIR application completely in HTML, JavaScript, DOM, and CSS. In AIR 1.5, the new SquirrelFish JavaScript interpreter from the WebKit project was added. This makes JavaScript code execution extremely fast within AIR.
The core of the HTML and JavaScript environment is represented by the
HTMLLoader class, which enables you to specify the HTML content to display in
an AIR application. HTMLLoader is part of
the flash.html package and is a subclass
of the Sprite class that does not
implement the UIComponent interface. If
you want to use the class in AIR applications created with Flex, you have to
extend the UIComponent interface and
include an HTMLLoader object.
The HTMLLoader object can also be accessed via JavaScript by using the htmlLoader property of the window object. In HTML windows, the HTMLLoader object contains all the HTML content
that is, in turn, contained in a NativeWindow object. Furthermore, the HTMLLoader object provides properties, methods,
and events to control how content is loaded and rendered within the AIR
application.
When you use HTML content in an application, you need to understand how to interact with ...