What's the point of Adobe AIR? [closed]

Question

I am a little confused. I keep seeing articles of how Adobe AIR can let you download apps that run on the desktop. Don't we have this already? How is this different from any WinForms or WPF application? Just the fact that you can download it from the web? Am I missing something?

Answer 1

Adobe have taken the run-anyware idea of web browser and web-server and created a desktop application framework. This means you can build a "website" that runs without a server.

There are a few nice things with this approach. The main one is that it makes it possible to do things locally that a website cannot do, like read and write files, or create native windows. And because the "browser" it runs in is a known quantity, you can take advantage of that with WebKit-specific extensions. Or you can just build it in Flash. Or combine the two as you need.

Adobe have also leveraged the cross-platform quality: both key pieces of AIR (Flash and WebKit) are already available on Windows, MacOS and Linux, so it was not that much of a stretch to make the whole of AIR cross-platform. This gives a really neat effect: the same .air file should install on any AIR install. And will run the same.

Answer 2

Sure, you can do things in WPF - if you're a .NET programmer. You can likewise do things in Java if you're a Java programmer. If you're a Flash/HTML/JS/web programmer, you can use AIR. Other than that, you're not missing anything.