This weekend I decided to spend some time developing my first cross-platform Adobe AIR desktop application. My first impression of Adobe Air was: Wow! It takes only a few minutes to see how easy and powerful this platform is. What’s great about AIR is that you can build Rich Internet Applications that run across operating systems (Win/OSX/Ubuntu) on the WebKit HTML engine and are easily delivered using a single installer file. You can also build desktop applications in JavaScript, a language that nearly everyone is familiar with.
What’s really cool about Adobe AIR is that the extension for Dreamweaver lets you transform a web-based application into a desktop application. Users can then run the application on their desktops and, in some cases, without an Internet connection. I already have a couple of these applications running on my Ubuntu desktop.
Also, Adobe AIR has an embedded database SQLite, which is an SQL92 & ACID compliant database engine with support for storing databases of up to 1TB. You can use this embedded database in your AIR Apps, and send SQL queries to it using JavaScript!
For a quick, hands-on illustration of how Adobe AIR works, read the following tutorials: