Adobe AIR in Action

Adobe’s AIR is the name of a runtime environment for creating desktop applications using an extended version of the Flex framework combined with Flash graphics to define the user interface. ‘Adobe AIR In Action’ is aimed at helping Flex and Flash developers to learn to program AIR applications. It is not aimed at complete newcomers to Flex and, at the very least, a basic understanding of the ActionScript programming language is assumed.

In eight chapters, the book concentrates on the special features of AIR - those things which set it apart from traditional browser-based Flex applications. It starts off with the fundamentals of creating, authenticating, building and running AIR applications. It then moves on to discuss specific topics including windows and menus, file system integration, copy-and-paste and drag-and-drop, using local databases, network communication, displaying HTML in AIR and distributing and updating AIR applications.

The book is well illustrated and includes lots of source code (available for download). There are some nice demos provided, notably the ‘AIRTube’ application which lets you find and display YouTube videos on your desktop.

The chapters generally give a pretty ‘in depth’ account of each topic. The chapter on file operations, for example, covers reading and writing data to and from file; plus copying, moving and deleting both files and directories. The book does not have much to say about the limitations of AIR, however (for example, AIR’s lack of a ‘shell execute’ function to launch executable programs). Even so, this is, on the whole, a very good guide to AIR which focuses in on just those things that an experienced Flex user needs to know.