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Adobe to deliver AIR for Linux (eWeek)Adobe to deliver AIR for Linux (eWeek)Posted Feb 29, 2008 7:41 UTC (Fri) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281)In reply to: Adobe to deliver AIR for Linux (eWeek) by Frej Parent article: Adobe to deliver AIR for Linux (eWeek)
Well, this is a completely different product than webkit and gecko. Flash is a framework for writing animations, with very convenient syntax, that runs inside all web browsers on lots of platforms. Due to its popularity it has a lot of developers. Flex is a GUI toolkit that runs on top of Flash (it's incidentally open source - but the Flash player isn't), and lets those developers write more traditional GUI-using apps that can then be deployed to 99% of desktop computers in the world, simply because 99% of desktops run web browsers with Flash inside. AIR goes a step further and lets you run a Flash/Flex application _outside_ of a web browser. Such applications are written in Flash/Flex, which is familiar to lots of developers, but can look much more like a traditional desktop app. I believe it also has some local file writing capabilities which Flash doesn't. The advantages of AIR are that there are many developers familiar with Flash/Flex, and that apps written in it can be run almost everywhere. Also due to the web-based nature of Flash, integration with the web is fairly easy (you can use e.g. HTML GET/POST). Disadvantages, IMO at least, are that while AIR has some FOSS components (Webkit, Flex, Sqlite), it isn't FOSS, and consequently unsurprisingly the Linux version will be coming out much later than the Windows and OS X versions. Another disadvantage is that AIR is far less 'complete' when compared to Java and Python, which are also cross-platform, and have a multitude of standard libraries and add-ons. If AIR doesn't look completely native on all platforms, then I really don't see what it has over, say, Python + GTK.
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Adobe to deliver AIR for Linux (eWeek) Posted Feb 29, 2008 12:23 UTC (Fri) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link] > Flash is a framework ... that runs ... on lots of platforms. Well, not on my platform, which happens to be a free software one.
Adobe to deliver AIR for Linux (eWeek) Posted Feb 29, 2008 12:56 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] > Well, this is a completely different product than webkit and gecko. With Gecko rendering engine you have things like XUL.. It's used for making applications that use Gecko, but run on your desktop like native applications. Things like Thunderbird or Komodo IDE. Now most of the time you install and run them like regular applications, but XUL also allows you to run applications off of networks also. They can be ran from within the browser or run in their own seperate windows. This way it's possible to deploy web-based applications that are desktop-friendly without the traditional limitations assocated with apps made from combinations of html, server side scripting, and javascript. Of course I haven't seen a example of anybody actually doing that yet aside from very small stuff.. but it's possible.
Adobe to deliver AIR for Linux (eWeek) Posted Feb 29, 2008 13:00 UTC (Fri) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link] Yes, when XULRunner is complete this will be an interesting platform for hybrid web/desktop apps. Songbird and Miro two example apps using that framework.
Adobe to deliver AIR for Linux (eWeek) Posted Feb 29, 2008 21:22 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Well XULRunner isn't strictly nessicary, I don't think. XUL is included with Firefox since it's based on it. I think you can Firefox as the basis for running your own application, but I am not sure since I have never realy done any XUL development or looked too closely at it. http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/The_Joy_of_XUL http://www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/whyxul.html Personally I'd rather have people building rich client applications over the internet based on XUL rather then AIR, but that's just me. XUL is open source, and is trying to create a open standard. Another competiting technology would be Microsoft's XAML based on WPF and is used in their Silverlight thingie.
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