When you think of Adobe, you probably think first about Photoshop, then the rest of creative suite, and then probably Flash. But Adobe is really a web company. Our tools are aimed very heavily at web developers and with Adobe AIR we wanted to appeal to all kinds of web developers, both those doing Flash and those doing JavaScript. You don’t have to use Flash to build a desktop application with Adobe AIR. Because we bundled the open source WebKit engine in AIR, you can build a desktop application using only the HTML/JavaScript that you’re used to using on web applications, with no Flash at all.

Recently we’ve been able to show a lot of very cool things with Ajax and Adobe AIR. Our bus tour is chock full of Ajax/AIR sessions so if you’re on the fence for attending one of these events in your city because you think it’s just going to be a Flash-fest, think again, and go register. In addition to Andre Charland from Nitobi, our own evangelists are going to be talking about how to leverage HTML/JavaScript inside of Adobe AIR. In fact, Kevin Hoyt has been working on a bunch of examples to show both how powerful JavaScript and AIR can be and how easy it is to get started. Over on his blog he has 35 different code samples for things like file input/output, using the embedded SQLite database and taking advantage of native window functionality, all being done without Flash.

We’re also trying to make Adobe AIR fit as easily as it can with your current development environment. To that end we’ve been working with Aptana to get Adobe AIR support in their IDE. That means you’ll be able to create and package an AIR application right from Aptana without having to mess with the command line (they’ve also got support for the iPhone so you have a bunch of places you can deploy your JavaScript application). Kevin has also been working with the Ext team to add support in their framework for AIR. They’ve created some custom classes in Ext that let you quickly and easily take advantage of AIR’s native windows and the SQLite database. Ajaxian also covered the news.

I’m really excited to see more Ajax developers dig into Adobe AIR and start pushing the limits of what it can do. We want to make it as easy as possible for any web developer to pick up their tools and start building desktop applications. We recently released an O’Reilly Pocketguide to help JavaScript developers get started. We’ve released it under the creative commons license so you can download the entire thing over at Ajaxian.

See you on the road.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Ajax, Aptana, Ext, JavaScript, onair2007. Both comments and pings are currently closed.