Stefan B.log

that’s kind of funny, getting an email from Adobe announcing Adobe® AIR™ 1.5 for Linux® in large letters:

BREAK FREE FROM THE BROWSER

I don’t want to break free (at least not from the browser ). I want a competitive desktop solution using Flex instead of Swing or SWT, but so far that’s not what I can get. If you want to know what is still the problem with AIR (IMHO), look at Mike Chamber’s blog about the CommandProxy.

I’ve used the same approach (communication via sockets) to access the Ruby Runtime and execute Ruby scripts on a Windows XP machine and do some MS automation (see Ruby On Windows). But that was just a hack and in my case for a special kind of application in mind not a feasible solution.

I attended the Adobe on AIR Tour in Amsterdam in april last year to take a fresh look on AIR and to talk to some of the Adobe guys, here with Mike Chambers (you can run, but you can’t hide). I tried to find out what is their point of view and what to expect from AIR in the future and what Adobe is aiming for - another widget toolkit or a real desktop platform? But unfortunately the answer was not clear. Now we are two minor AIR releases (1.1, 1.5) further ahead and it’s still not clear to me. Ok, ok, I know it’s all about security and cross platform issues, but I still think Adobe is missing the point - even Java had JNI just from the start and SUN was adding more and more platform specific features to the JDK and has launched the JDesktop Integration Components (JDIC) project on javadesktop.org - for good reasons.

I’ve seen this article written by Yakov Fain and couldn’t agree more:

Dear Adobe, please make AIR a full-fledged desktop development platform. You can’t be a little pregnant.

Please don’t get me wrong - I like AIR, especially that Adobe has integrated the WebKit browser engine (can’t wait for JWebPane). I wish I would have the same HTML stuff in Flex running in a browser (but that’s another story).

So, Adobe, please give us the freedom to rock out on any platform! Yes, I want to break free…

Btw, here is Adobe’s demo AIR application to show some nice features:

In this post I mentioned that the rendering of a MatchDataGrid can be a bit slow when too many visible cells are used. Ok, here is a full size demo. And I’ve added some features:

• Font size slider
• Yahoo theme switch
• Some settings stored on client side as LSO (Local Shared Object)
• To be continued…