Adobe® AIR™ Bible

Chapter 2. Setting Up Your Development Environment

The first step toward developing an AIR application is setting up your development environment and installing AIR. You have many options in AIR since you can develop in Flash, Flex, or HTML, as well as asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Adobe has released support for AIR in Flash CS3 and Flex 3.0, which includes both the Eclipse-based Flex Builder 3.0 and the Flex SDK. Dreamweaver CS3 has support for AIR for AJAX development.

You can use Flash, Flex, and Dreamweaver to test and publish AIR packages, making development streamlined and simple while allowing you to work in an environment you may already be very familiar with. For developers who would prefer to use another IDE, Adobe has also released the AIR SDK, which you can use to develop and compile AIR applications with just about any text editor. This chapter goes over how to set up Flash, Flex, and Dreamweaver, and also how to develop using the SDK.

Along with a development environment, Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is required to test, run, and install AIR applications. AIR is available on Windows and Mac OS X and will soon be available in many distributions of Linux. This chapter gives instructions for both installing and uninstalling the run time on all three operating systems. Chapter 17 discusses development in Linux in more detail.

Adobe Integrated Runtime

ActionScript, the language used in Flash and Flex, has evolved significantly from its beginnings as a simple script used ...