Adobe's AIR Goes Gold

The New York Times covers Adobe's release of AIR into the wild. Model Metrics gets a few blurbs in the process and a front row seat on the launch page.

Going gold is excellent for us as we've (and by we, I mostly mean Jason) been fighting with rolling betas since AIR was Apollo. A solid runtime gives us more reliability to send stuff out into the wild.

The big talking point here will be "browser versus the desktop" since AIR takes browser based development, adds a lot of functionality and throws it all into a cross-platform cooker. I'll be honest and say I don't really see the battle as a battle. Some things I'll want to have as integrated pieces within a website and that will be Flex. Some things will have requirements Flex can't support (like offline data work or system level access) and those things will be AIR. One of my angles, for instance, is to build apps that access one's Salesforce.com organization continually outside of the browser. So that will be an AIR app that someone can always access without having to login through Firefox, for instance. Some things, though, will just be rich content associated with established pages, hence they'll be Flex.

I've rambled about Flex and AIR before. I've never been a huge fan of Flash, largely because the development environment rubs me the wrong way. Flex, though, only uses Flash as an endpoint. The development is more akin to HTML/Javascript except it's XML/ActionScript. So basically like AJAX development but with a real compiler and variable types.

So huzzah to Adobe.