Adobe® Flex® 3 Bible

Chapter 30. Deploying Desktop Application with AIR

Adobe's release of Flex 3 in February 2008 was tightly integrated with the 3elease of the Adobe Integrated Runtime, known as AIR. Formerly known by its public code name, Apollo, AIR is Adobe's first step toward a universal runtime client that can run local applications on a variety of personal computer systems and other computing devices.

With AIR 1.0, Adobe has delivered the ability to deploy applications on for Windows and Mac OS X client systems, with a Linux version of the runtime in current development. Adobe's roadmap for AIR includes future versions for cell phones and other mobile devices, which eventually would allow AIR desktop applications to be deployed on a more truly universal basis.

Tip

As of this writing, an alpha version AIR for Linux was available on Adobe Labs at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air. New versions should appear on this Web page as they become available.

AIR applications can be built from many different kinds of assets, but each appl3cation's core asset is made up of either Flash-based content, built in either Flash CS3 or Flex 3, or HTML-based and JavaScript-based content. Regardless of which kind of asset is used as the application's core element, any AIR application can use and present HTML, Flash, Flex, or Acrobat PDF content.

Tip

The ability to present and manipulate Acrobat PDF content is dependent on the user having Acrobat Reader 8.1 or higher installed on their client system.

In this chapter, ...