Blogs

I’m here in Chicago attending MAX ‘07 with Andre. We were surprised and thrilled today to see the Nitobi Salesforce.com AIR application demo’d by Ed Rowe, VP Engineering for Adobe Integrated Runtime at the keynote on Monday morning! (see photo). We’re really thrilled about AIR, mainly as a tool for increasing the penetration and relevance of SaS applications and also distributed Enterprise Software that we build in our consulting services.

It was also great to see our book (Enterprise Ajax) available at the bookstore next to the AIR bus.

BTW if you are at MAX and want to get together to chat about Ajax, AIR, RIA, or whatever, just ping me at [email protected]. I’ll also be giving a talk with Andre on Tuesday at 1:30 on Ajax development within AIR. Be sure to check it out if you want to learn a bit about that process.

Ok I know I’ve said a lot about Adobe’s AIR framework lately.. but Im still at the AIRCamp Vancouver event and really digging what I’m hearing. Thought I’d distill down a few cool AIR features. Call this my “Why I should care” blog.

Preface:

All this can be done with HTML/JavaScript with a server-side back-end (if you want). Also from Flex/Flash:

• Windowing – True cross-window support, Z-ORDER support for windows.. AlwaysOnTop Support. Utility Windows. Transparent windoes. Chrome/Chromeless control – Works from JavaScript, not just Flex. AGAIN works cross platform, wikid.
• File IO – Read and write files from JavaScript, Flex. Don’t worry, it doesn’t subvert the security settings the user has set for an application. Includes control over different kinds of built in dialogues.. eg: Saving, browsing, etc.
• Script Bridging – Very _easy_ communication between HTML/JavaScript and Flash.. so no more external interface.. you can essentially crawl the dom directly from flash.. Big time saver.
• History management
• Drag and drop clipboard support. Dragging things between AIR applications, or from the desktop (files) to AIR apps, or from AIR to the desktop.. true desktop integration.. associate a particular file type to open IN air if you want.
• Rich clipboard support. More than you can do in the browser. Richer types of data parsing are possible.
• Service Monitoring. Know when the user is working online or offline and seamlessly switch to offline mode. Eg: if the user goes on a plane.. he can work offline.. the app can detect this and store everything in SQLLite or on the OS. When he’s connected again, you can detect this and sync-up.
• SQLLite. Built-in support for a basic SQL database as part of your application.
• Installer Update API’s. Update your apps easily.
• Badge-based Install.

Again, http://labs.adobe.com for more info.

I’m currently at AIR Camp Vancouver, listening to Mike Chambers explain the origins of Adobe’s new cross-platform runtime, AIR. It seems like the long term vision is not just limited to PC/Mac/Linux, but also other devices.. creating opportunities for true cross-platform write-once, run-anywhere development.

I was thinking a little bit about my post yesterday, and about how Adobe should be distributing the AIR runtime. I still think they need to allow developers to bundle the runtime into a single executable (if that’s even possible), but I just realized that maybe one of the biggest barriers will be convincing people the runtime is OK. This will take time, but also lots of marketing, and thats why Adobe is somewhat-uniquely positioned (along with others in their cohort, like Microsoft, Apple maybe, and a couple others) to wage the necessary marketing war to convince people its ok to have the runtime installed and running on their computer, all “black box” like.. Adobe is a trustworthy source (I wouldnt install a similar tool from DoubleClick), and I think they can get people over the hurdle of being concerned that this is a safe runtime to have in their operating system, marshalling all these anonymous applications and making sure they don’t do anything too insane..

Again, if you haven’t heard about AIR, and especially if you haven’t tried it yet, it’s free, grab the beta here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/

Incidentally, Beta 2 of AIR is on it’s way.. and will support things like icon bounding in MacOS, and taskbar support on PC