Adobe Air

The Adobe® AIR™ runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that run outside the browser on multiple operating systems.

Business benefits
Adobe AIR offers an exciting new way to engage customers with innovative, branded applications, without requiring changes to existing technology, people, or processes.

With the Adobe® AIR™ runtime, you can deliver branded rich Internet applications outside the browser that give you a closer connection to your customer.
Adobe AIR uses the same proven, cost-effective technologies used to build web applications, so development and deployment is rapid and low risk. You can use your existing web development resources to create engaging, branded applications that run on all major desktop operating systems.
The benefits are extensive. By using Adobe AIR as part of your RIA strategy, you can boost productivity, extend your market reach, enhance customer satisfaction, improve customer retention, lower costs, and increase profits.
Business benefits
Companies like eBay, AOL, and NASDAQ are already using Adobe AIR to deliver engaging RIAs to their users' desktops. With Adobe AIR, you can:
Establish a more persistent connection with existing customers
Deliver fully branded experiences with desktop functionality
Leverage existing personnel, processes, and infrastructure
Develop and deliver RIAs efficiently using proven Adobe technology
Increase the ROI of your web investments

Commercial considerations
Adobe offers its own commercial development tools for Flex-based AIR development. Adobe's Flex IDE, which we tested briefly, is built on top of the open-source Eclipse IDE and includes robust support for drag-and-drop visual Flex application design. AIR development tools have also been incorporated into Dreamweaver CS3. Adobe has fortunately made its own tools entirely optional, so AIR developers don't have to worry about getting locked into expensive commercial design software.

AIR support is already being integrated into third-party commercial development tools such as Aptana Studio. AIR developers can also use a conventional text editor in conjunction with Adobe's free command-line tools. Flex and AIR development can be done entirely with standard text editors; in fact, most of the programs we created during our tests were written in Vim on Ubuntu Linux and then compiled and tested on Windows in VMware.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of Adobe AIR, it helps to understand a few key terms and break down what it means to be a "cross-operating system runtime" that can run desktop applications.

AIR is, first of all, a runtime engine at its most basic. A runtime engine is simply computer software that other applications need to use in order to run properly; it translates language within a program into machine language, the simple, lowest level language (essentially 0s and 1s) the central processing unit (CPU) can understand. Programs that run on Java, for example, require the Java Virtual Machine runtime engine installed on the computer. Without it, your computer wouldn't be able to make use of the same graphical user interface (GUI) that you're used to using now. A GUI, also known as a human-computer interface, is the combination of windows, icons, text and menus that we can change with a mouse or a keyboard. Even your operating system can be considered the mother of all runtime engines, since every application on your computer depends on the processes of the operating system.
So when Adobe describes AIR as a "cross-operating system runtime," they just mean that AIR is a runtime that can work on any computer, regardless of the operating system. Different operating systems use different languages; a program running on Mac OSX, for instance, won't look the same as the same program running on Windows XP. Applications built with Adobe programs such as Flash or Flex will use the AIR runtime to display -- because AIR comes the with the open-source WebKit HTML renderer, Web-like content can display on the desktop. That's the big difference between something like a Flash player and AIR: While Flash works over the Internet and in your Web browser, applications running off of AIR are based on the desktop and don't necessarily require a browser to work.