Alexei@Nitobi

So our very own Andre Charland is on tour right now with the Adobe folks on the AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) bus tour http://onair.adobe.com/. Besides the fact that it looks like a lot of fun, its a great opportunity for us to be demoing not only our components, but also helping spread the word about Adobe’s new development tool.

For those who don’t know, AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that allows web developers to leverage their existing web development skills (such as Flash, Flex, HTML and JavaScript) to build and deploy web applications and content to the desktop.

AIR is exciting to web developers for few reasons:

1. Cross platform desktop applications. This is killer. Imagine, write an application for the desktop once, and have it run on any platform – MacOS, Linux, Windows, etc.
2. Write desktop apps in JavaScript/HTML. Yes. Write pretty darn powerful web applications and have them run like native desktop apps. You can also use Flex to build these applications for a richer experience.
3. Apps that act like desktop apps. Don’t worry.. this isn’t just a chrome-less browser running on your desktop. This is a pretty full featured application framework that gives you access to the file system, system tray, and the web at the same time.
4. Better integration for web applications. If you have a web application and would like your users to have a desktop component to that, this is the way to do it. Pownce is showing us how.

Nitobi’s Fisheye Running in AIR on my desktop

So what does this mean for the web development community?

1. Well for one thing, it means that we’ll be seeing a lot more desktop integration for online applications in general, which means a better experience for users.
2. We’re going to see a further proliferation of web API’s. Having seamless access to the web through AIR makes consuming and using web API’s much easier and makes a lot of sense, frankly.
3. At the risk of sounding like a tout, I think we’ll see a growing interest in things like Flex, which are similar in the way they leverage existing skillsets to build applications. Also, AIR apps can be build with Flex in addition to JS/HTML.

What are the challenges / risks?

In general I think it will be crucial for Adobe to find effect means of distributing the AIR runtime component.. much the way they did with Flash. Blogs and advertising will get them the techy community, but to get real desktop penetration, they’ll need to ship it with a browser or piece of software that everybody owns. I had some ideas of my own… not all of them practical.

1. Let developers bundle the runtime with .AIR applications! To my knowledge you cannot bundle the AIR runtime with your app. This would be a technical challenge, sure.. but not impossible to do. The goal would be to give a single executable away that users can run that will execute the AIR runtime if they don’t have it installed and then let the application run.
2. Give some version of Photoshop away for free (one that does a LOT). Put AIR in the installer. Market the heck out of it. Get it bundled with everything as a killer value-add.
3. Send it to customers with Adobe Updater. You’ll get millions of households that way.
4. I dont think they’d get it bundled with a browser, but they might be able to get it pre-installed on Dell machines or convince Apple to put it in MacOS.. Why would they? Well, it really helps their customers after all, and Adobe might be able to sweeten the deal by shipping a free scaled-down version of Photoshop (maybe not called photoshop) – possibly under Apple branding. Small market, but an influential one.

A final thought here is the risk of someone uncovering a security hole or flaw in AIR that results in a PR firestorm for Adobe. If that happened, it would really hurt it’s chances of being adopted. This happened to ActiveX in IE. This is going to be a tricky tightrope for Adobe – offering enough power within the runtime, but pre-emptively avoiding any potential holes before they become vulnerabilities. When we visited Adobe earlier this year it really sounded like that was a major focus of theirs. We’ve noticed they’ve been very cautious in turning on functionality in Webkit, and I would guess that they’ve scaled back the capabilities of AIR for the initial release just to reduce their exposure should they have forgotten anything.

At any rate, I have doubt that this will become a major feature of the web. After playing with AIR myself, I’m quite impressed with how easy it is to build pretty powerful functionality. If you haven’t downloaded it, get on over to the Adobe website (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/) and grab it. There are some great free resources here: http://www.ajaxian.com/downloads/books/AdobeAIR_for_javascript_developers.pdf if you’re looking for tutorials and the like.

�

| Del.icio.us

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 1:25 pm and is filed under ajax, web2.0, business, web development, safari, air. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.