Adobe Integrated Runtime, also known as
Adobe AIR, is a
cross-platformIn computing, cross-platform, or multi-platform, is an attribute conferred to computer software or computing methods and concepts that are implemented and inter-operate on multiple computer platforms...
runtime environment developed by
Adobe SystemsAdobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...
for building
Rich Internet ApplicationA Rich Internet Application is a Web application that has many of the characteristics of desktop application software, typically delivered either by way of a site-specific browser, via a browser plug-in, independent sandboxes, extensive use of JavaScript, or virtual machines...
s (RIA) using
Adobe FlashAdobe Flash is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to web pages. Flash is frequently used for advertisements, games and flash animations for broadcast...
,
Adobe FlexAdobe Flex is a software development kit released by Adobe Systems for the development and deployment of cross-platform rich Internet applications based on the Adobe Flash platform...
,
HTMLHyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
, and
AjaxAjax is a group of interrelated web development methods used on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications...
, that can be run as
desktop applicationsApplication software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. Examples include enterprise software, accounting software, office suites, graphics software and media players. Many application programs deal principally with...
or on mobile devices. The runtime supports installable applications on
WindowsMicrosoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
,
LinuxLinux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
,
Mac OSMac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface...
and some mobile operating systems such as
iOSiOS is an operating system for iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, and Apple TV.IOS may also refer to:-Companies and organisations:* Illinois Ornithological Society, American state-based bird club...
and Android.
With AIR, Adobe intends to provide a versatile runtime-environment that allows existing Flash,
ActionScriptActionScript is an object-oriented language originally developed by Macromedia Inc. . It is a dialect of ECMAScript , and is used primarily for the development of websites and software targeting the Adobe Flash Player platform, used on Web pages in the form of...
, or HTML and
JavaScriptJavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
code to be used to construct Internet-based applications that have many of the characteristics of more traditional desktop-like programs. Adobe positions it as a
browser-lessA web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
runtime for
RIAsA Rich Internet Application is a Web application that has many of the characteristics of desktop application software, typically delivered either by way of a site-specific browser, via a browser plug-in, independent sandboxes, extensive use of JavaScript, or virtual machines...
that can be deployed onto the desktop, rather than as a full-fledged
application frameworkIn computer programming, an application framework consists of a software framework used by software developers to implement the standard structure of an application for a specific development environment ....
. An application deployed in a browser does not require installation, while one deployed with AIR requires the application be packaged, digitally signed, and installed on the user's local file system. This provides access to local storage and file systems, while browser-deployed applications are more limited in where and how data can be accessed and stored.
Adobe AIR internally uses
Adobe Flash PlayerThe Adobe Flash Player is software for viewing multimedia, Rich Internet Applications and streaming video and audio, on a computer web browser or on supported mobile devices. Flash Player runs SWF files that can be created by the Adobe Flash authoring tool, by Adobe Flex or by a number of other...
as the runtime environment, and
ActionScriptActionScript is an object-oriented language originally developed by Macromedia Inc. . It is a dialect of ECMAScript , and is used primarily for the development of websites and software targeting the Adobe Flash Player platform, used on Web pages in the form of...
3 as the sole programming language. Flash applications must specifically be built for the Adobe AIR runtime in order to utilize additional features provided, such as file system integration, native client extensions, native window/screen integration, taskbar/dock integration, and hardware integration with connected
AccelerometerAn accelerometer is a device that measures proper acceleration, also called the four-acceleration. This is not necessarily the same as the coordinate acceleration , but is rather the type of acceleration associated with the phenomenon of weight experienced by a test mass that resides in the frame...
and GPS devices. AIR enables applications to work with data in multiple different ways, including local files, local
SQLiteSQLite is an ACID-compliant embedded relational database management system contained in a relatively small C programming library. The source code for SQLite is in the public domain and implements most of the SQL standard...
databases for which AIR has inbuilt support, a database server via web services, or the encrypted local store included with AIR.
Availability
The latest version of Adobe AIR, Version 3, contains
Adobe Flash PlayerThe Adobe Flash Player is software for viewing multimedia, Rich Internet Applications and streaming video and audio, on a computer web browser or on supported mobile devices. Flash Player runs SWF files that can be created by the Adobe Flash authoring tool, by Adobe Flex or by a number of other...
11, and is available for
WindowsMicrosoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
(XP and newer) and
Mac OS XMac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
. Official support for desktop Linux distributions ceased in June 2011 with version 2.6, though AIR 3 is supported on select mobile operating systems, Android (ARM Cortex-A8 and above) and
AppleThe apple is the pomaceous fruit of the apple tree, species Malus domestica in the rose family . It is one of the most widely cultivated tree fruits, and the most widely known of the many members of genus Malus that are used by humans. Apple grow on small, deciduous trees that blossom in the spring...
iOSiOS is an operating system for iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, and Apple TV.IOS may also refer to:-Companies and organisations:* Illinois Ornithological Society, American state-based bird club...
.
In January 2009, Adobe claimed that there were over 100 million installations of Adobe AIR worldwide, and that "the majority of AIR runtime installations occur at the time the first AIR application is installed by a user". The large number of installations is actually because Adobe AIR was included with all downloaded installations of
Adobe ReaderAdobe Acrobat is a family of application software developed by Adobe Systems to view, create, manipulate, print and manage files in Portable Document Format . All members of the family, except Adobe Reader , are commercial software, while the latter is available as freeware and can be downloaded...
9 (released in July, 2008), Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, with no option for exclusion either in the download or in the installation. Adobe still bundles Adobe AIR (along with the application Acrobat.com) with the Adobe Reader 9.3 download, with no option for exclusion, and the installation file for Adobe Reader 9.3 also installs Adobe AIR.
"Apollo" 1.0 Betas
Adobe made a public preview release of AIR (then called Apollo) along with a
software development kitA software development kit is typically a set of software development tools that allows for the creation of applications for a certain software package, software framework, hardware platform, computer system, video game console, operating system, or similar platform.It may be something as simple...
(SDK) and extension for developing Apollo applications with the Flex framework, on March 19, 2007.
On June 10, 2007, Apollo was renamed to AIR and a public beta release of the runtime was launched. Public beta 2 of AIR SDK was released on October 1, 2007. Public beta 3, was released on December 12, 2007.
Adobe AIR 1.0
Version 1.0 of the Adobe AIR runtime and SDK was released on February 25, 2008.
Adobe AIR 1.1
Version 1.1 of Adobe AIR was released on June 16, 2008. This release included a number of new features including:
- Support for additional languages including Chinese Traditional, Chinese Simplified, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish
- Support for localizing the name, description local database error messages of the application
- A new option that allows an application to be updated from an old certificate to a new one while preserving the identity of the application (for example from a self-signed certificate to a chained certificate)
- A new property for detecting the space available on a drive
- A new property for detecting whether the hosting operating system's window manager supports transparency
In addition, version 1.1 includes support for Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise.
Adobe AIR 1.5
Adobe AIR 1.5 was released on November 17, 2008. New capabilities included:
- Support for encrypting the local database
- Inclusion of Flash Player 10 features
- An updated version of WebKit
WebKit is a layout engine designed to allow web browsers to render web pages. WebKit powers Google Chrome and Apple Safari and by October 2011 held over 33% of the browser market share between them. It is also used as the basis for the experimental browser included with the Amazon Kindle ebook...
with performance improvements due to a new JavaScript interpreter
- Support for five new languages including Czech, Dutch, Swedish, Turkish and Polish
- A Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
version was released on December 18, 2008.
Adobe AIR 1.5.1
Released on February 24, 2009, AIR 1.5.1 was primarily a compatibility update that includes bug fixes and security updates.
Adobe AIR 1.5.2
Released on July 30, 2009, AIR 1.5.2 introduced a number of minor new features and compatibility issues. Some of important fixes included:
- When using the full-screen interactive mode an application using the 1.5.2 namespace can capture the keyDown event and call the preventDefault method of the event
- SWF content embedded within an HTML container could now be displayed with certain wmode settings.
Adobe AIR 1.5.3
Adobe AIR 1.5.3 was released on December 8, 2009. It included fixes for a number of compatibility and security related issues. The
BBC iPlayerBBC iPlayer, commonly shortened to iPlayer, is an internet television and radio service, developed by the BBC to extend its former RealPlayer-based and other streamed video clip content to include whole TV shows....
Desktop manager v1.5.15695.18135 is the first version to use AIR 1.5.3.
AIR 2.0
The Adobe AIR 2 public beta was released on November 16, 2009 followed by the beta 2 on February 2, 2010 and the release candidate on May 11, 2010. In addition, Adobe AIR for Android was announced on February 12, 2010. AIR 2 was officially released for Windows, Mac OS and Linux on June 10, 2010 and Android on October 8, 2010. It dropped support for
PowerPCPowerPC is a RISC architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM...
Macs.
AIR 2.6
Adobe AIR 2.6 was released on February 24, 2011 for Android devices. Another update was released on March 22, 2011 for updated Apple iOS support.
AIR 3.0
Adobe released Adobe AIR 3.0 on October 3, 2011. AIR 3.0 included support for native 64-bit CPU architecture, hardware accelerated graphics rendering, captive runtime, JPEG-XR image format, LZMA compression for SWF files, and H.264 encoding.
Application development
Adobe AIR supports Flash applications by running them within a contained Flash Player instance, and
HTMLHyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
/
JavaScriptJavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
/
AjaxAjax is a group of interrelated web development methods used on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications...
web applications by running them within the included
WebKitWebKit is a layout engine designed to allow web browsers to render web pages. WebKit powers Google Chrome and Apple Safari and by October 2011 held over 33% of the browser market share between them. It is also used as the basis for the experimental browser included with the Amazon Kindle ebook...
rendering engineA web browser engine, , is a software component that takes marked up content and formatting information and displays the formatted content on the screen. It "paints" on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer...
. Multiple instances of the browser can be started within a single AIR application, but JavaScript content executes with some security limitations.
Adobe has provided a free SDK in order to build AIR applications, known as the AIR SDK. The AIR SDK allows developers to use any
text editorA text editor is a type of program used for editing plain text files.Text editors are often provided with operating systems or software development packages, and can be used to change configuration files and programming language source code....
such as
Notepad++Notepad++ is a text editor and source code editor for Windows. One advantage of Notepad++ over the built-in Windows text editor, Notepad, is tabbed editing, which allows working with multiple open files.Notepad++ is distributed as free software...
or
FlashDevelopFlashDevelop is an integrated development environment for Adobe Flash application development.It uses the free Adobe Flex SDK in order to build ActionScript 3 and MXML applications, the free MTASC compiler to build ActionScript 2 applications, and the free HaXe toolkit to build ActionScript 3,...
(an IDE) to edit ActionScript source code (.as files), and then build a corresponding AIR application or AIR installer (.air file) from the same.
Adobe provides for AIR HTML/JavaScript development with Adobe Dreamweaver CS5, although any other
HTML editorAn HTML editor is a software application for creating web pages. Although the HTML markup of a web page can be written with any text editor, specialized HTML editors can offer convenience and added functionality. For example, many HTML editors work not only with HTML, but also with related...
or text editor can be used.
ActionScript
Adobe AIR applications can be built either with the
Adobe FlexAdobe Flex is a software development kit released by Adobe Systems for the development and deployment of cross-platform rich Internet applications based on the Adobe Flash platform...
Framework, or without. The framework is an integrated collection of stylable
Graphical User InterfaceIn computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...
, data manipulation and networking components, and applications built upon it are known as "Flex" applications. Applications built without the framework depend entirely on the developer's own skills and artistic abilities, and are commonly known as "pure ActionScript" projects.
In both methods, developers can access the full Flash Player set of functionalities, including
textA text file is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists within a computer file system...
,
vector graphicsVector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygon, which are all based on mathematical expressions, to represent images in computer graphics...
,
bitmapIn computer graphics, a bitmap or pixmap is a type of memory organization or image file format used to store digital images. The term bitmap comes from the computer programming terminology, meaning just a map of bits, a spatially mapped array of bits. Now, along with pixmap, it commonly refers to...
graphics,
videoVideo is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...
,
audioAudio is an electrical or other representation of sound.Audio may also refer to:*Audio, audible content in media production and publishing*AUDIO , an American R&B band of 5 brothers formerly known as TNT Boyz and as B5...
, camera and microphone support, among others. Adobe AIR also includes additional features such as file system integration, native extensions, native desktop integration, and hardware integration with connected devices.
Adobe provides two ways of developing AIR applications in ActionScript:
- Adobe Flash Builder (formerly Adobe Flex Builder
Adobe Flash Builder is an integrated development environment built on the Eclipse platform that speeds development of rich Internet applications and cross-platform desktop applications, particularly for the Adobe Flash platform. Adobe Flash Builder 4 is available in three editions: Standard,...
)
- Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to web pages. Flash is frequently used for advertisements, games and flash animations for broadcast...
CS4 or newer
Third-party development environments that target the AIR runtime are also available:
- FlashDevelop
FlashDevelop is an integrated development environment for Adobe Flash application development.It uses the free Adobe Flex SDK in order to build ActionScript 3 and MXML applications, the free MTASC compiler to build ActionScript 2 applications, and the free HaXe toolkit to build ActionScript 3,...
, an open-source Flash ActionScript IDE, which includes a debugger for AIR applications
- FDT by PowerFlasher Solutions, a commercial ActionScript IDE
JavaScript
Adobe AIR supports a subset of
JavaScriptJavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
, which does not support dynamic execution of code when running in the application sandbox. According to the Adobe, this restriction is designed to prevent malicious remote content from attacking a user's system. Due to this restriction, JavaScript frameworks that make use of dynamic JavaScript functions like eval were not initially compatible with Adobe AIR. However, several frameworks including
Dojo ToolkitDojo Toolkit is an open source modular JavaScript library designed to ease the rapid development of cross-platform, JavaScript/Ajax-based applications and web sites. It was started by Alex Russell, Dylan Schiemann, David Schontzler, and others in 2004 and is dual-licensed under the modified BSD...
,
jQueryjQuery is a cross-browser JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML. It was released in January 2006 at BarCamp NYC by John Resig...
, and
ExtJSExt JS is a JavaScript library for building interactive web applications using techniques such as Ajax, DHTML and DOM scripting.Originally built as an add-on library extension of YUI by Jack Slocum, Ext includes interoperability with jQuery and Prototype...
were updated to support Adobe AIR's application sandbox. Some frameworks like
MooToolsMooTools is a lightweight, object-oriented, web-application framework for JavaScript, written in JavaScript. It is released under the free, open-source MIT License...
were already compatible.
Dreamweaver CS4/CS3 requires an additional extension to compile AIR applications, as does Flash CS3 in the form of an update. The cross-platform nature of the runtime means any HTML editor, coupled with the AIR SDK, can create AIR applications.
Criticisms
Developers' community finds AIR's features on Android devices lacking. For example AEC support is added to AIR Platform, but Android runtime is left excluded, using self-proven motivations that add no real-life value. As a result, although most of Android devices have built-in AEC capabilities, AIR applications suffer a lot from echo issues. This lacking of features also decreases AIR applications' popularity.
External links