September 2008
Intermediate to advanced
660 pages
20h 32m
English
Content preview from Programming Flex 3Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 21. Building AIR Applications
Up to this point in the book, we’ve looked at how to use Flex to build web applications. However, Flex 3 allows you to build more than web applications. It also allows you to build AIR applications for the desktop. In this chapter, you’ll learn about Adobe AIR and how to use Flex to build AIR applications.
Understanding AIR
Adobe AIR allows developers to use Flash, Flex, and/or HTML/Ajax to create desktop applications. As this is a book about Flex, we’ll only look at using Flex to build AIR applications in this chapter.
AIR is a platform consisting of a runtime environment and developer tools for creating AIR applications. The runtime environment, called the AIR runtime, is a free download from Adobe that users must have installed on their computers to run AIR applications. Conceptually, this runtime environment is very similar to other common runtime environments such as the .NET runtime and the Java runtime. The basic concept is that developers can build applications that run in the runtime environment, allowing for a simple way to create cross-platform applications.
Building an AIR application with Flex is remarkably easy. You can build a basic AIR application using what you learned in the other chapters in this book, together with just a few workflow and technical changes that you’ll read about in the next section. However, you can do more in an AIR application than merely run a standard Flex application in the AIR runtime instead of in a web ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.