Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook

Chapter 16. Application Updates

In the past when a bug was found or an enhancement was needed, developers working on Internet-based applications enjoyed the simplicity of quickly and seamlessly updating the application running on their servers. This metaphor changes when developing applications for the desktop on Adobe AIR; under this model, updates now need to be distributed to the complete user base.

Now that your application resides in an environment you do not “own,” you must take additional measures. To maintain the ability to perform seamless updates, you must include update procedures in your application before it goes into the wild so that it can “phone home” to get updates if and when needed.

Creating Applications with Update Capabilities

Problem

You are creating an AIR application that you plan to distribute and want to build in the ability to upgrade your users to new versions quickly.

Solution

Use the Adobe AIR Update Framework library, which is new to AIR 1.5 and makes it easier for applications to handle the various update scenarios that may arise.

Discussion

The Adobe AIR Update Framework library offers you all the functionality you need to create AIR applications that can remotely update themselves. The framework retrieves specifics about the available update from a remote XML file. This file contains versioning information, as well as the location of the update files. This file is accessed whenever the application makes a request to check for an update. Consider the following ...