What's the advantage of an Adobe AIR app over a traditional desktop app?

Question

I'm pretty familiar with using Adobe Flex & AS3, and compared with writing apps in JS/HTML I think it's very cool. However, since AIR is essentially a non-browser version of Flex with benefits like local storage, it seems to be competing as a cross-platform desktop application platform... and in that space it's much less mature than more established desktop technologies.

So what's the advantage of creating a desktop application using AIR compared to something like Java (or C++ using a cross-platform GUI library like wxWidgets)? Java's equally capable of communicating with the server for instance, I'm not quite sure what AIR adds when competing head-to-head in the desktop development world?

Answer 1

In my opinion the biggest advantage is productivity (if you are interested only on desktop)- it's much more faster to build a nice UI using Flex compared with Java Swing for example (try to build a transition in Swing). Also the new components from Flex4 allows to do component skinning much easier.

However (as written by Groky) you should take into account also the disadvantages. It would help if you write down what are the main features of your planned app and check how they are handled by various platforms. For example if multithreading is needed AIR is a bad choice.