Learning Adobe Air

Posted in Adobe Air JavaScript on 3 September 2008

I am planning to learn more about [play with] Adobe Air in my spare time over the next few months.

The Adobe AIR runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems.

I figure it’s likely to be less of a learning curve than another coding language because you can build an application with HTML, CSS and JavaScript [Ajax] and subsequently use Air to deploy it to the desktop. Adobe Air will ‘package’ everything and create the installation file. Well, there’s a bit more to it than that but you get the idea.

Getting started

You’ll need the Adobe Air runtime which will allow you to install Air applications.
The Air SDK will provide tools for building Air applications in a development environment

Both of these are available on the Adobe Air Tools page.

Optionally, you may also want to get some help from other applications. I’ll be using the Adobe Air extension for Dreamweaver which allows you to work with Air applications within Dreamweaver. Other tools that you may want to consider include Aptana Studio which has an Air plugin.

Things to consider

I may also need to re-learn a few JavaScript basics

I am happy working with HTML, CSS and JavaScript but I don’t call myself a hardcore JS developer [I’d like to though]. I tend to use a library like jQuery for JavaScript these days. I should be able to continue with this approach but I may also need to re-learn a few JavaScript basics. For that reason, I’ll be re-reading DOM Scripting or Bulletproof Ajax. A book like Simply JavaScript might also come in handy and there’s a copy on its way to me now…

Starting tutorials

These are the tutorials I have been looking at so far. They are pretty simple for the moment but you have to start somewhere!

Simple To Do List by Akash Mehta
To Do List by Jonathan Snook

I also want to look at Snippely which is an Air application that provides a means of storing text and code snippets. The source code is available. I might even use this to store CSS and JavaScript code fragments for my ‘day job’.

Spare time booked up!

All in all, I reckon I have a busy few months ahead but I hope to learn a few new things along the way….

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