Adobe® AIR™ Bible

Chapter 3. Building Your First AIR Application

In this chapter, you can develop your first AIR applications using Flex Builder, Flash, and Dreamweaver. Though this may sound a little intimidating, you will discover that the Adobe IDEs make it very simple and straightforward to develop and test your projects without ever needing to touch the Command line.

To keep things simple at this stage, I help you focus on setting up projects using the various IDEs and testing the applications, but not deploying them as AIR files.

Note

For more information on digitally signing your applications and deploying them, see Chapter 20.

Using Flex Builder 3

To get started in Flex Builder, begin by creating a new Flex Project. In the window that appears, select Desktop application as your application type and give your project a name. In the windows that follow, you may choose to configure a custom project structure or use the default structure. Using the default is recommended.

Once you have finished setting up your project, the main application MXML file located in the src directory should contain something similar to Listing 3.1.

The code basically declares that your main application class subclasses WindowedApplication and contains nothing to display. Clicking the debug button in the top toolbar launches the application for testing purposes. If you were to click the debug button at this point, a window would launch and contain just an empty gray background. Go ahead and try it. If a window launches and ...