Adobe AIR, Adobe Flex 3 available
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Feb 25, 2008 at 12:41pm
Adobe has announced the availability of Adobe AIR and Adobe Flex 3 software.
Adobe AIR, Adobe Flex and Adobe Flash Player software are the foundation of the Adobe technology platform for RIAs (rich Internet applications). Adobe RIA technologies include tools, frameworks, servers, services, and runtimes that work together. There are a variety of learning resources at the Adobe Developer Connection to help developers immediately start building RIAs for the browser and the desktop.
Adobe AIR enables developers to create RIAs on the desktop using the skills and Web technologies—such as HTML, Ajax, PDF, Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex—they already employ, according to Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s chief technology officer.. Applications deployed on Adobe AIR have the advantages of browser-based RIAs, such as speed of development, ease of use, and access from virtually anywhere, he adds. Yet they also have the benefits of desktop applications, such as the ability to read/write local files, work with other applications on a user’s computer and maintain local data storage on the desktop, Lynch says.
Flex is a free, open source framework for building interactive RIAs. Adobe Flex Builder 3, an Eclipse based development tool, accelerates Flex application development and includes new capabilities for deploying RIAs on Adobe AIR. Adobe Flex Builder 3 integrates with Adobe Creative Suite 3. New testing tools, including memory and performance profilers and integrated support for automated functional testing, speed up development and lead to higher performing RIAs.
Major portions of Adobe AIR, such as the WebKit HTML engine, Tamarin ActionScript™ Virtual Machine, and SQLite local database functionality, are open source. Lynch says that Adobe is committed to contributing to the open source community on multiple fronts, including the release of the free open source Flex framework and open source BlazeDS for high-speed data connectivity, as well as active membership in the SQLite Consortium. Go here for more info.
The Adobe AIR and the Adobe AIR SDKs (software developer kits) are available as free downloads in English and offered for both Mac and Windows platforms.
The Adobe Flex 3 product line is available now in English and Japanese, and offered for both Mac and Windows operating systems. The open source Flex 3 SDK is available free of charge and a beta version of Adobe Flex Builder 3 for Linux is freely available on Adobe Labs. Adobe Flex Builder 3 is available as a standalone product or Eclipse plug-in, with the Standard edition priced at US$249 and the Professional edition at $699.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
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