Adobe® AIR™ Bible

Chapter 18. Sample Application: LogReader

At this point, you are probably aching to build a useful, real-world application rather than just experiment with example projects. You're in luck! This chapter walks you through developing a log reader. The purpose of this application is to display logger output from Flash content — whether it be a Web site or fellow AIR application. Having a nice log reader in your toolkit is an invaluable resource, as it is something you can use to aid in the development of every one of your projects.

As you will learn while developing this application, you do not need to use every single AIR feature to make a great AIR application. There are certainly features such as filesystem access that you will use more often than not, but this project aims to demonstrate how a useful application can be derived using the same Flash and Flex components that you may be familiar with from Web development.

At the end of the chapter is a challenge for reworking this application to be more versatile and take full advantage of the AIR framework.

Requirements

Before diving into the architecture, let's establish some requirements regarding the application's functionality and user interface.

Functionality

A good log reader is simple, yet flexible. More specifically, it needs to have:

• A basic Application Programming Interface (API) for sending log messages to the reader

• Easy integration with a logger, such as the Flex logger

• The ability to clear the log reader's console from the application's ...