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.

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